At this hand-powered Madera County flower farm, bouquet colors don't match, potatoes show up among the zigzagging zinnias and the well just ran dry -- but that's a source of entertainment as well as alarm.
"Everybody quiet," says John C. (or "young John") Warner, 45, before his brother Ray drops a pebble down the empty well. It falls 280 feet, sending back eerie "dwoooops" suitable for a sci-fi sound effect.
The assembled Warners giggle.
"Talk to the well, Ray," says 17-year-old sister Glory.
Ray, 20, drops down and shouts "Here, water-water-water" into a hole that distorts his voice.
The Warners giggle again. It's been a good well: It let them support their family for 13 years. They'll just laugh and dig 100 feet deeper.
Whole Systems Agriculture flower farm -- at 2 acres, really a giant backyard -- was John Warner's answer (he's "old John") to the dilemma of how he was going to "take care of all these kids," back when his six children were younger and he was making $6.25 an hour teaching agriculture for the California Conservation Corps and collecting a retirement pension from 29 years as a teacher in the Los Angeles area.
The Warners sell flowers twice a week at a farmer's market and to the occasional florist who comes out to buy blooms en masse for a wedding. The business has a Web site that offers tips on baking bread and protecting the planet, but little information on how to buy anything from them. It's not a high-dollar enterprise, says the elder Warner, but it provides a rich life.
On a recent day at the flower farm behind a ranch house in a semirural neighborhood of lawns and rosebushes, the voice of Warner, 72, is heard through his children, long before he makes a personal appearance to announce that his parenting "was not entirely consistent by any means."
"Our dad says ..." is a common refrain. According to this hearsay, Warner likes science, doesn't like lazy hippies and attributes the fall of the Roman Empire to the tilling of the soil.
The Warners don't till. They put mulch over the top to keep down weeds instead of turning up the earth.
Tilling degrades the land, Ray says, but with mulching "it gets better every year."
There's a long row of small tractors behind the defunct well on this no-machine farm. The Warners have never used any of them -- for one thing, none of the tractors works. Neighbors just keep giving them broken tractors, figuring they can fix and use them once they change their minds about not using machinery.
Hands-on
Some weeds have burst through the mulch and grown "taller than all these kids," as John C. puts it.
Ray eagerly shows how he's been using a scythe to whack them down. John C. nods approvingly.
"There's not another farm in the San Joaquin Valley using that tool," says John C. about the curved blade that these days is usually only seen at Halloween in the hands of the grim reaper.
"We are a 100% hand-powered farm," Ray says.
He's recently back from "wwoofing," taking part in World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. The idea is to exchange work at farms worldwide for food and a place to stay.
After several e-mail exchanges, Ray went to work at a farm in Costa Rica, but when he got there he found the farm was nothing more than a couple of banana trees.
"It was a hippie rainbow-gathering type family," he says. "We laid in hammocks all the time."
He came home eager to work on the family flower farm. He's a Fresno City College student planning to transfer to Fresno State and major in agriculture -- although that may be too much the other direction from Central-American-counterculture-hammock-swinging for him.
A few rules are needed to help foster a feeling of community. We encourage a free and open exchange of ideas in a climate of mutual respect, but any post that violates someone's right to use and enjoy fresnobee.com is prohibited. Before you post, please read the terms of use and obey these simple guidelines.
Here are the ground rules:
Contents of this site are © Copyright The Fresno Bee. All rights reserved.
E-Mail
Print
@Nyx.CommentBody@