Malinda Lo

True confession time: I am fascinated by agriculture. I believe this began when I first read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy as a kid. Sure, everybody loves Little House on the Prairie etc., but my favorite of her books was her mouth-watering depiction of Almanzo Wilder’s childhood on a farm. The food in that book was intense. I remember fondly the scene in which Almanzo and his family go out digging potatoes, and of course it’s freezing outside and hard work, but what sticks with me? They roasted the potatoes in some kind of underground pit (I can’t remember exactly) and they eat them, all hot and mealy (I think this was the first time I encountered the word mealy), nearly burning their fingers. Yum.

Obviously, Farmer Boy was something of a fantasy, but hey, it created a lifelong and growing fascination with farming, recently stoked by Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent memoir/sustainable eco-farming manifesto, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.

Given my fascination with agriculture and the fact that I live in Northern California, where there’s an agricultural festival practically every month, I like to go to county fairs. This past weekend I went to the Sonoma County Harvest Fair (not to be confused with the bigger Sonoma County Fair held in August), where I witnessed many a wondrous thing, beginning with these giant pumpkins.

That was closely followed by a rainbow display of beautiful local apples.

It’s not all food at the Sonoma County Harvest Fair, though. There are also animals. Among the more fascinating of these creatures are the pgymy goats, which are paraded around by children and adults in some kind of beauty pageant.

Even cooler, though, are the sheepdog trials. This is where sheepdogs have to herd a trio of baa-ing sheep through a series of gates and narrow chutes into a pen. This isn’t a very good photo (because the animals were moving, thus blurring things up), but you can get an idea of what happens:

Basically, the sheepdog stalks the sheep. He (or she, who knows?) follows them on soft paws and then drops instantly to the ground, as if he/she were about to pounce on them like a mountain lion. The sheep, who don’t have eyes in the backs of their heads, nonetheless seem to be able to feel when the sheepdog is nearby, and they move in a clump (acting like sheep, of course) where the sheepdog directs them (usually). The dog proceeds to slink forward, repeatedly slumping into a crouch behind them, until the sheep do his/her bidding. It is amazing.

Last but not least, Sonoma County is known for that thing called wine. Yes, I went wine-tasting, since seemingly hundreds of vineyards from Sonoma County bring their wares to the fair for people to taste. That was fun and I picked up some great wine, but in addition to the wine-tasting there’s this thing called grape-stomping. It’s where people jump on grapes in a big barrel and squeeze out the liquid into a jug held by their partner. There are prizes for this thing.

Here they are preparing the barrels:

Then the pairs of grape-stompers get to work with one in the barrel leaping up and down and trying to smush the grape juice through a tiny spout into a big glass jug held by their partner below, who also has one arm deep in the barrel helping to force the juice out.

Here’s a close-up (the guy wearing the grape stomp T-shirt and his partner won this round — they were both totally covered with grape juice by the end):

And yes, those two women in the overalls are wearing hats strapped with purple balloons. Ah, wine country.