Tessie's "AT Section Hike" Adventure

Tessie is conditioned to think that anytime I pick up the car keys while we are at Hawksbill Cabin, she is going for a ride.  On weekend mornings she has a pretty good chance of being right - but at other times, it's just as likely I'm heading out there because I forgot my phone charger.

However, last Sunday morning she was right, and we went out for a walk of a mile or so on the Luray Hawksbill Greenway.  We got back after and hour or so and I went to work writing - that came easy to me, so I finished earlier than I expected.  I decided we might head up to Shenandoah National Park for a short hike.

 The parking lot at the trailhead I wanted to go on was full, with spillover traffic on the shoulders, so we passed on.  I settled for the Pinnacles picnic area instead, with the thought we might explore a stretch of the AT in the direction of Mary's Rock - no plan for how far we'd go, just a leg stretcher and to keep Tessie trained on how to walk on leash in those conditions.

Off we went, her leading the way - she is a border collie, after all.  There was an easy leg on this hike, about 3 tenths of a mile and negligible altitude changes, to Jewell Hollow overlook.  I decided we'd keep it short and I'd work with her coming up on the rocks there with me, and on walking carefully on brick walls.

We did take a little side trail for another tenth of a mile maybe.  All totaled, 8 tenths of a mile or so, and then negligible altitude change.  We did get to take in a wonderful view of Page Valley, with Lake Arrowhead in the foreground, and she had quite a few good sniffs along the AT.

One thing I've come to enjoy about stretches of the AT in the vicinity of Thornton Gap - that is the construction of the trails.  Although the main tread areas can be well worn, often the masonry has held up very well, considering some of it was laid down in the 1930's by the CCC.  You can see this along the right side of the trail in the photo above - nicely mitered edge to that border.

This was Tessie's fourth hike in Shenandoah National Park.  It's fun to think about this as an actual shakedown for a longer day hike with something that could seriously be called a section - say 10 miles or so.  I'll have to think about how we would provision it, and maybe we'll take something like that on in the fall.

Flight of the Ospreys

Okay, I created the label "airplane geek" attached to this post so that I could upload random photos of aircraft that I happen to catch in passing.  We live close enough to Andrews AFB - sorry, that's Joint Base Andrews these days - that we see planes coming and going fairly frequently.

I have seen the V-22 Osprey in the air a few times, in fact there is already a post with them on the blog, showing two sightings: one at National Airport, and the other of a pair in the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington.

I may have a post with a couple of B-1s, but I am still looking for it - when I worked in Arlington last, we'd see regular flyovers from Arlington Cemetery.

If there are tactical or strategic aircraft flying over and I can safely do it, I will snap a photo.  This goes back to my enlistment in the Air Force - I was stationed at bases that rarely had much of an assigned force all those years.  When we made our trips out to West Germany to visit "real" bases, we'd sit in awe and watch the runways.

...and I still like doing that!

Some Mendocino Favorites

In a previous post, I mentioned that Mary and I visited Mendocino in 1995 and 2000, and still have fond memories of those trips.  Even after this third trip, we haven’t grown tired of it.  In fact, it was a lot of fun to simply walk around rediscovering old memories of the place.

The local lore is that set shots for “Murder She Wrote” were taken here, as were some location shots (even I, a tourist, could give you directions to Jessica’s house!).  Sorry, but I didn’t take a photo of it – it’s operating as a bed and breakfast these days, though, so should be easy enough to find with a search.

The town was the location for other movies and television as well.  A favorite among these is "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming" - which also used the similarity to New England as the location setting for the story.

I’ve selected a few of my favorites here – the sculpture on top of the old Masonic Hall (now a bank), a view of the beach from the headlands, a shot of Mary on the headlands with the town in the background, and a shot of the town from a similar nearby vantage point.

This is the last post I’ll write about our visit to Mendocino, as our too short visit quickly came to an end.  From here, we headed back through Anderson Valley and on to Oakland, which we used as a base for two days of sightseeing in San Francisco – those posts are next.

The Sea Lion Rookery at Caspar

The sea lion rookery, just offshore.

When we first arrived in Mendocino on our vacation, since our room was not ready for check-in we decided to head over to the Point Cabrillo lighthouse. 

As I mention in the post last week, we learned there was a sea lion rookery nearby, and decided we would make time for a stop before we left town.

There is a private neighborhood there, so no cars are permitted down to the beach.  However, there is public parking nearby, and you can walk down the road to public beach for a look.  Although there is a little work involved to find it, the walk is fairly easy and some climbing on the bluffs is required.

A view of the Point Cabrillo light from the bluffs.

The sea lions are off shore on a little island there – I took the photo above from the bluffs to show the island.  I think there were probably several hundred out there on the day we visited.  It was a real treat to see them all.

I Googled to see if I could find additional info.  There’s no specific page or Wikipedia article, but there are plenty of other references to this rookery.  I found this very interesting map of the area on a California agency’s page:  

http://www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/pdfs/rpnc_draft/habitat21.pdf

The Glass Beach at Fort Bragg

This week I’ll continue with a few more posts from our recent vacation in Mendocino, CA.  First up, Glass Beach at Fort Bragg, California –

As Mary and I started researching some of the sites we could visit while we were on the North Coast, I came across the Fort Bragg Chamber of Commerce website, and from there I learned about “Glass Beach,” which is part of MacKerricher State Park.  There’s a beautiful traditional beach there, but the surprise is the namesake phenomenon.

Apparently, this stretch of beach was used as the town dump for a few decades.  There was an industrial site (I seem to remember some lumber facilities from past visits) there too, which eventually led to closing off the dump.  The sea did its incredible, inexhaustible work and broke done everything that was tossed there, leaving only polished sea glass behind.

We made a point to visit and also to hike along the beach there.  While collecting the glass is discouraged, and there are signs to that effect, there were several people out there scooping up fragments – it’s a popular complaint that most of the colorful pieces are gone (we heard this in the CVS where we asked for directions, and from a woman we met walking there who is a docent at one of the other heritage facilities nearby).

Mary scooped up a handful to show how accidentally beautiful the place is.  There is literally no sand – all polished glass. 

There’s a Wikipedia page here, if you want to look into it:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Beach_(Fort_Bragg,_California)

Alexandria Hops - June Update

Last Monday I gave an update on how Dan's hopyard is doing over at Beaver Run Brewery in Stanley, so today I'll make a short post on how the ones I have in the backyard in Alexandria are doing.  Readers may recall that I have one Willamette bine and two Goldings bines - the Willamette and one of the Goldings are both in their second year, while the other Golding is a new plant started this spring.

The Willamette bine.

Cones starting to form on the Willamette.

 Last year, the Willamette didn't produce any cones.  I've been told that they take three years to reach full maturity, so you can't expect full production until then. However, I changed it's location to a spot in the full sun, and it is growing very well, with buds forming already - I'll have a small crop of Willamette this fall.

I can't put an optimally sized trellis up in the spot I have this one planted in because the power line to the house crosses over there.  It only goes up to seven feet, and it has reached the top and started to bunch up there.  This is where most of the cones will likely be when it is time to harvest. 

The two Goldings bines.

The Goldings are faring poorly this year.  Moving the second year plant probably set it back, and the first year plant is focusing its energy on establishment, so I don't expect much of a harvest over there.  

As far as conditions go, for the Goldings bines I have a 10-foot trellis set up, so they have room to grow.  As of last Tuesday morning the older plant had made it up to five feet or so - I think the location here is part of the problem.  There may not be enough sun on them during the day to get full growth, which compounds the problem I created when I moved the older plant.

I'm still optimistic.  Last year I had a half dozen or more little cones on the one Goldings bines, so I hope that it will produce something.  I'll reward it by finding a better place for it next year.

The Light at Point Cabrillo

We arrived in Mendocino only to be told it was too early to check into our room, so we decided to take a short drive a few miles north to the Point Cabrillo light station.  It is a favorite destination of mine – you park in a lot out by the PCH, and walk across the headlands to the light, which has been completely restored since our 2000 visit.  The round trip, and some side trips along the bluffs, totaled about 2.5 miles, the first of several “easy day hikes” we took in on this vacation.

Our walk down to the light crossed through the salty meadows of the headlands.  When we reached the bluffs, a turn south would take us directly to the lighthouse, but we heard the sound of sea lions nearby and decided to walk north instead.  We encountered an incredible tidal pool, but there was no sign of the sea lions.

When we arrived back at the lighthouse, we toured the displays and the building, but you cannot actually go up into the light here, since it is still a working signal.  The exhibits explain the history of the lighthouse, and of shipwrecks that have been found in the area.  Point Cabrillo was built to guide ships along the coast from San Francisco to pick up the forest and industrial products coming from this region.  

We chatted with the docent, and she explained that the sea lions were a few miles further north, on a small island with a rookery on it.  She gave us directions, and we decided to come back later, after we went back to Mendocino to check in at the hotel.

A final treat awaited us – the original keepers’ houses here have been restored and are available for season vacation rentals.  I don’t know that this is in our cards for a future trip (we stay at the John Dougherty House, and have for all three of our trips) – but these Craftsman-style bungalows are charming.  I suppose the real dream would be to research up the floor plans and find an architect to design one for us on some future acreage somewhere.

We’ll let that thought hang in the air for a while.  Meanwhile, we headed back to Mendocino to check in, and hiked around the headlands again before dinner.

Here’s a link to the lighthouse page:  http://www.pointcabrillo.org

Roederer Bubbles

 Our vacation in Mendocino was something of an anniversary trip. Our visit in 1995 was the year before our wedding, and we had such a great visit we incorporated some of our experiences in the wedding.  Mary’s wedding ring is from the Old Gold store in Mendocino, for example. 

Also, we ordered a couple of cases of sparkling wine from the Roederer Estates vineyard on Route 128, which we just happened to stop by at during that 1995 trip.

It was a fledgling internet back then, and shipping wine from the west coast was pretty challenging in those days, but we managed to make the connection and we used the Brut for our toasts.  The vintner threw in a magnum for us, which he personally signed. 

I sent a few emails to Roederer while we were planning this year’s trip, and included a photo of the signed bottle (also shown here).  We had opened the bottle with friends to celebrate buying our first house in Alexandria, but we kept the bottle as a memento of the wedding and our California vacations. The folks at the vineyard told me that Michel the winemaker had retired, so we had a rare keepsake in this bottle.

The Roederer website (linked at the end of the post) previews their tasting arrangement, but it also offers a picnic as one of the things you can do during a visit.  I thought this sounded like a great idea for a celebration and booked the picnic a few days before we left on the trip.

We were treated to a great selection of craft foods from the Anderson Valley wine region – sausages, goats and sheep milk cheeses, and fresh fruit (peaches were already in out there!).  We chose the Brut Rose as an accompaniment. 

We stayed for an hour or so, enjoying the scenery and the wine – and the beautiful weather in the Anderson Valley area.  Then it was back on the road to Mendocino, still about 90 minutes away at that point.

A link to the Roederer Vineyard is here:  http://www.roedererestate.com. It’s definitely worth the stop if you find yourself in their neck of the woods.

The Road to Mendocino

On our vacation, Mary and I decided to cut the drive from Sunnyvale to Mendocino in half by staying in Windsor, a small town just south of Healdsburg.  We used that as a base to make our evening stop at the Bear Republic tap room, and since we planned to make two stops on the drive to the coast, it just made sense.  I wrote about one stop – the Anderson Valley Brewery – last week, and my next post will be about the second stop, which was the Roederer Estate vineyard. 

The drive from Healdsburg to Mendocino follows 101 for a few miles north, then you exit to California Route 128 and drive west.  It is one of my favorite California drives – along with the road from Greenfield across the mountains to Carmel, and of course, Mulholland Drive in LA.  We rented a convertible Mustang for the drive once, which was great.

I’d received a text from my friends Kelly and Tom to check out a barn on Chalk Hill Road, near the winery, in Healdsburg and told them we would on our way out of town.  Turns out that Tom’s parents had a little spread here for a while, and the barn was designed by Tom to be used as a guest house on the property.  It was close enough to the road to get a decent photo, but there’s more info on the Kamm Architecture webpage.

From there we continued our drive, with the requisite stops at AVBC in Philo and then at Roederer.  The last ten miles or so of Route 128 winds through a grove of coastal redwoods, another California treat, before you emerge on the coast at the mouth of the Navarro River (spoiler alert – we stopped at Navarro Vineyard on the way back).

We went to check in upon arrival at our first night’s hotel – the final photo shows the view from the doorway to the front desk.  We’d last been here in 2000, so we were looking forward to getting reacquainted with the incredible scenery in the town and its surroundings. 

Dan's Hopyard - June 2014

Yesterday, after taking Tessie for a walk on the Luray Hawksbill Greenway, I decided to make a stop by neighbor Dan's to check out how the hop yard is doing this year.  I guess I'll post on the status of my Willamette and Goldings bines later this week as well, but my plants aren't doing anywhere near as well as his.

The first photo is a look across several rows, with most of the view showing Cascades.  Of all the varieties in his hopyard, which include Willamette, Golding, Fuggles, and Centennial, these do the best.  In fact, that's why I didn't plant them - I want more space for those than I have in the backyard in Alexandria, so I settled on getting some variety instead.

The second photo offers a close up of cones forming, again on the Cascades.  But this is the case with all of his plants - they're are all busting out like crazy this year.  He has taken to calling 2014 the year of the hop, as a matter of fact.

Later in the day, I spoke to another friend in Luray, Bill, who planted a half-dozen Cascade rhizomes that Dan gave him in his in-town backyard.  I used some of his hops in my "Tax-Day IPA" from earlier this year.  Bill reported that his plants have gone crazy too - I spied them a little bit from the parking lot when I took Tessie for her walk.

For a long time, Dan has suspected that some pecan trees in the backyard, near where the hops are, were having a negative impact on the Willamettes production.  He decided to take a couple of rhizomes and plant them as decoration on their patio.  The final photo I have here shows how one of those plants is doing - looking good again this year.

Last year, Mary and I took a week-long vacation at Hawksbill Cabin, and on one of the days we went up to neighbor Dan's for a cook-out.  We took a walk through the hopyard that time as well - here's a link to the post, showing the plants at nearly the same stage as what I saw yesterday:

http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/2013/05/hops-progress.html

I still have some vacation posts to catch up on, and I'll get back to those tomorrow.

The NorCal Brewery Tour - part 3

Brian, enjoying the day's offering of
"Hell or High Watermelon"

Today’s post will conclude my three-post series about the brewery visits Mary and I made during our recent vacation to Northern California.  This post is about 21^st Amendment, which is located in the SOMA area of San Francisco, near Giants Stadium, while the previous posts were about Bear Republic, North Coast, Russian River, and Anderson Valley.

The stop at 21^st Amendment was a not exactly but kind of an ad hoc affair, thrown into my friend Brian’s “50-cent” tour of San Francisco.  There will be a future post about the tour, and while this stop alone was worth at least 25 cents, he didn’t charge us extra.  As a tip, I’ve decided to throw in this photo of him enjoying a glass of “Hell or High Watermelon” outside at the brewery, and also, I’ll remind him: Don’t play in the freeway.

Obligatory deckel.

(For a preview of my future post about Brian's 50-cent tour, you can check out Brian’s blog post about the day here:  http://breakfastatepiphany.blogspot.com/2014/06/dotties-true-blue-cafe.html)

This brewery is pretty well known, even around my local in Bethesda, because the beer finds its way to a distributor in Maryland and so Jay and Sonoo carry it (heck, I just bought a sixpack of it there last night!).  A friend raved about the watermelon wheat beer last year, and I’ve tried some of the other offerings as well – so of all the breweries, this was my “must see” – thanks again to Brian.

When our friend Cathy first moved out to San Francisco in the early 1990’s, she took an apartment in SOMA near where the old Embarcadero Freeway stood.  We went to dinner near there – as it turns out, Brian parked on a street we remembered from those old days, so we had a good run of memories going for us during the stop.

The brew list.

Apparently, the weekends – I’m assuming these are non-game weekends, since you can see Giants Stadium only three or four blocks away – are a time for the brewers to come out and do demonstrations of small batches.  They had a five-gallon set-up going and were brewing one of those trendy beer-wine combinations, and they had samples of a wheat marzen they had brewed a few weeks before, so we tried it. 

All good; but while the wheat marzen is not one I am likely to try brewing myself for a while, I do plan to make a watermelon wheat this summer (in time for Independence Day), and I have a kit for the beer-wine combo, which I plan to do during July.

Their taproom has a great urban feel to it, so it would make for a good stop practically any sunny day in San Francisco.  Then again, if it happened to be a foggy or rainy day, you could also stop in for one of their dubbels or maybe a stout.  The food offerings looked pretty good as well.

21st Amendment's Taproom.

Here’s the link to 21^st Amendment:  http://21st-amendment.com/

This wraps up the brewery series.  Next week I’ll continue with selected posts from the vacation – and hopefully, I’ll have my first post of the year on the Luray-Page County Farmers Market.

The NorCal Brew Tour - Part 2

The deckel from AVBC.

Today I’m continuing with a series of three posts about the vacation to Northern California that Mary and I recently took – these three cover the five breweries we visited.  Yesterday I wrote about Bear Republic, North Coast, and Russian River; today is about Anderson Valley, and tomorrow will close out the series at 21^st Amendment. 

Of the five breweries that we visited on the trip, Mary and I had been to Anderson Valley and North Coast on previous trips to Mendocino in 1995 and 2000.  Anderson Valley is conveniently situated about halfway along Route 128 from Highway 101 to the PCH.  It’s in wine country, as well, but it made a good stop for us on the way to our destination.

A row of hop bines along the parking area.

The years since our first visit in 1995 have been good to Anderson Valley.  They make excellent beers, and they have adopted a sustainable philosophy, installing solar power at the brewery.  There were several hopyards around – I’ve got a photo here of them, mostly Cascades, as with many of the Northern California breweries.

A more traditional hopyard out by Route 128.

I’ve also got a photo of the taproom here, just for a reference for myself and friends, if we ever do finally chase the dream of opening a brewery ourselves.  A clean, well-lit place, as Hemingway once said – and that is exactly what I have in mind.

The AVBC Taproom.

My selections for sampling.

After checking out the offerings, I chose four to have in the little sample glasses.  I picked one of the namesake offerings, a weizen, a saison, and then the Chilean Porter.  All were good, but I really enjoyed the Saison and the Porter – both were enough of an inspiration that I might look into them for future brew projects.  

Especially the porter!

Tomorrow I will wrap up this series of posts, but until then, here is a link to the Anderson Valley brewery:

https://avbc.com/

The NorCal Brew Tour - part 1

These are the North Coast offerings.

Mary and I are just back from our west coast vacation, and as I looked through the photos on my iPhone, I saw the opportunity for more than a dozen posts – over and above the series I did last week on farmers markets.  So, yes, I am going to put them up – but the problem is where to start, and after some thinking, I believe I will start with the breweries.

It wasn’t an outright objective of the trip, but I remembered from the first time we went to Mendocino, that the drive through Anderson Valley takes you by what many consider to be the start of the American craft brew industry, between Mendocino Brewing and Anderson Valley Brewing.  I didn’t get to the Mendocino taproom, but we did go to five breweries during the trip:

• Bear Republic
• Anderson Valley
• North Coast
• Russian River
• 21^st Amendment

We did a little extra sightseeing at Anderson Valley and 21^st Amendment, so I will put up individual posts about them this week.  In this inaugural post of the series, I’ll cover the other three, which are linked at the end of the post.

The Bear Republic deckel.

Our first brewery stop was Bear Republic.  I have found their beer at the local Whole Foods at home in Alexandria, and since we were stopping overnight at Healdsburg on the way to Mendocino from Sunnyvale, we decided to go there for dinner (Mary indulged me).  I had the Hop Rod Rye, since the Racer 5 is the one I can get at home, and each of us had a dinner salad.

We were there on Sunday night, and since the brewery is so accessible from the North Bay up 101, it was packed – also contributing was the timing of our Memorial Day weekend stop there.  It was pretty amazing to see how enthusiastic the crowd out there was about these craft breweries – there were groups enjoying tastings at every one of the places we went to, no matter what time of day.

North Coast.

The second brewery for today, and our third stop, was North Coast, up in Fort Bragg, California.  We’ve been to this one a few times, this being our third trip to Mendocino, but I wasn’t prepared for how the operation had grown.  They had three buildings at the intersection there on the north end of town, with a sign designating the area as a “Brew Campus.” 

After our sightseeing in the area, we went in to sample some beers – like several of the others, you can buy a four or five ounce glass for about two bucks, so four of them make a pint and they’ll discount that from $8 down to around $6.  I chose the Blue Star (an old favorite of mine, and I even have a ball cap with the logo on it somewhere), Acme IPA, and two Belgian styles, Le Merle and Pranqster.  The Belgians were good and may have inspired me to do a couple in that style myself later in the summer.

Pliny was here.

For the final one today, we stopped by Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa on the way back to San Francisco from Mendocino.  You know, they have that famous double IPA here, Pliny the Elder, which I have not been able to find in Virginia – so it was worth the detour.  I got a half pint, and got a second half pint of Blind Pig, because “I’m big on the Pig.”

Of the two, I really liked the Blind Pig – I haven’t gotten all caught up in this double thing, and a solid IPA is a great thing to enjoy here and there.  Mary and I had lunch there as well, some sandwiches, before continuing south back to the Bay Area.  As far as the town goes, we didn’t spend much time there, but it is very similar to the other 101 towns heading North from San Francisco – I haven’t researched it well, and there are probably good tourist things to do, but for us it was a matter of convenience for a stop halfway back to the Bay.

I’ll post about the other two in the next few days.  For now, here are links to the three breweries I have posted about this time:

http://bearrepublic.com/

http://russianriverbrewing.com/

http://www.northcoastbrewing.com/

The Old Oakland Market

On Friday morning I had set up a short business meeting over coffee with a colleague near the Oakland Federal Building.  I walked the seven or so blocks up there, and to my surprise, found that I was strolling right through the middle of the Old Oakland Farmers Market. So while I thought I was finished writing about farmers markets this trip, it turns out I have one more in me.

I decided to go ahead and post since our vacation is coming to an end, and I won't have the chance to write again for a few days...maybe not even until next Tuesday.  Also, this will be a rare Saturday post - I can probably still count how many of those there were on one hand, even after seven years!

Turns out there is a decent market history in this part of Oakland - the farmers market is near a building that is named the Housewives Market, and it is similar to the Union Market building in DC.  Also, the blocks that are closed off for this one border on Oakland's China Town, and I heard Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese being spoken among the clientele - so I expected to see regional offerings to reflect their tastes.

The two photos here show some Asian vegetables - bitter melon and Thai eggplant.  I also saw tables of greens (I may have had some of that lettuce and cilantro at dinner tonight over at Le Cheval), green beans, squash, and traditional eggplant, not to mention an incredible display of strawberries.





For value-add ag, there wasn't much to mention here - the size of the city and these neighborhoods probably make a straight produce set up profitable enough.  There was a booth offering "home made" soap, although the packaging suggested otherwise.

And then there was this incredible honey booth - large jars of it, and the proprietor even offers to recycle your old honey bottles.  Mary told me she'd seen an article somewhere that offered to set up bee hives, with the host getting a share of production.  I'm wondering if this booth is part of that operation.

So this will be the final post during the vacation.  I have a lot of material to write-up when we get back to Alexandria, probably enough to cover the month of June.  So until my next post, have a good one!

The Fort Bragg (CA) Farmers Market

Maybe it's eccentric, but when we arrived in Mendocino I saw the poster for the Mendocino Farmers Markets.  I made a mental note to check out the one in Fort Bragg, since it was scheduled for Wednesday and we would still be in town.  I was interested in seeing what sorts of crops might be available already - it being so early in the season, and I wanted to compare the offerings with what we had seen at the Mountain View market (see yesterday's post).

I'll write more about the town itself in a future post (I actually have a pretty good backlog of posts from this vacation), but for now I'll just say that with a population of just over 7,000, Fort Bragg is comparable to Luray - just substitute the Safeway for the Food Lion, and don't let a Wal-Mart in - and with Mendocino and a couple of other small towns around, you have a population base that is similar to Page County, only maybe more remote.

The market wasn't hard to find - they'd closed off a block downtown for it, very near the North Coast "brewery campus."  There were probably 15-20 farmers there, a few with crops (notably onions, carrots, and lettuce), and a few other with what I have been calling "value-add ag."  Included in this group were a couple of bakers, a nursery, and a goatherd that was selling locally-made chevres.  We bought some of the goat cheese, and a specialty product they had of Peruvian origin - caramel made with goat's milk - and took it back to the hotel for a snack, along with a baguette from one of the bakers.

Last year during our May vacation, we visited the Shenandoah Valley Produce Auction, in Dayton, Virginia (see the post here), and while there were some crops around (not to mention pie!), the emphasis was on flowers and young plants that you could transplant into your own garden for summer crops.  At Fort Bragg, there were three or four booths that featured tomato, squash, and pepper plants.  Also, much like the Mountain View market we visited on Sunday, there was a "Sprout Lady."

I think the most interesting vendor was the Mendocino Maples Nursery, where they had more than 20 trees on display.  They advertised having specimens from "around the world" - I imagine they will be beautiful trees when they are fully grown and established in somebody's landscape.

This will be the final post for May 2014, and closes out the mini-series I've had going on Farmers Markets out here on the West Coast.  Next week, we'll be back in Virginia, and I'll roll out the rest of the tale about our vacation.