Urban farmers come home to start Rancho Roots, a market garden and historic orchard

Two Rancho Cordova natives returned home to share their passion for urban farming by starting Rancho Roots, tucked off of Coloma Road, where they planted crops and resumed use of the surviving trees of an historic persimmon orchard.

Husband and wife duo Greg and Alex Kerekez met in 2003 at Cordova High School, when they played in a garage band together. Alex played drums and Greg played lead guitar.

“We got used to working together as a team early on and enjoyed taking on challenging projects together,” Alex Kerekez said.

A dream team from the start, they graduated from Cordova in 2005, went to Sacramento City College together, then transferred to San Jose State. Both avid enthusiasts of permaculture philosophy and homesteading movements, they channeled their shared love of into backyard gardens in Los Gatos after college. After nearly a decade in the San Jose area, they were ready to come home in 2018, bringing the knowledge, experience, and passion they developed for urban farming with them. The Kerekezes said coming back to their hometown has allowed them to participate in the community they say “gave them so much” growing up.

“Let’s go share something that we’re interested in doing, that’s a part of our whole heart and soul,” Alex said. “Where’s it going to matter most? We agreed pretty easily that it is Rancho Cordova, where we met, where we first fell in love with nature, where we first fell in love with each other.”

‘Trying to push the limits’

After moving back, the Kerekezes turned their respective parents’ yards into urban farms with an array of crops like beets, lettuces, kale and tomatoes they shared with friends and family.

Once they had those yards dialed-in, they looked past Greg’s mother’s fence to the remnants of a neglected persimmon orchard, where 19 trees lie on two-thirds of an acre behind Cordova Baptist Church and preschool.

The church and preschool are on the old Ryan Estate, land that was likely once a part of Williamson Ranch, a network of fruit and nut orchards that covered the area beginning in the mid to late 1800s before the land was developed in the 1960s, according to the school’s director, Carrie Huppert. The farmhouse behind the church now serves as the main building for Cordova Baptist Preschool. Founded in 1963, the school has seen generations of Rancho Cordovans grow up, including Greg, who remembers eating fruit from the trees.

These are Hachiya persimmons, also known as “the baking kind,” said Greg, because they have to ripen to softness to be edible. They have a sweet, soft flavor and fleshy texture that adds moistness to baked goods like breads and cookies and pairs well with brown sugar and spices in the fall when they are ready to eat.

Alex said they have “really been trying to push the limits” with what they can do with the persimmons, including making purees for baking and making tea from the leaves.

“It’s similar to the flavor of an earthy green tea,” Alex said, and is also very high in vitamin C.

The Kerekezes have learned a traditional Japanese candying technique called hoshigaki. Because of the high sugar content of the Hachiya varietal, they can be skinned, blanched, dried and using a gentle massaging technique, the fruit develops a white, sugar-coated outside and a gooey-sweet inside. Hoshigaki take about a month to make, and because persimmons are a fall fruit, they are traditionally eaten during the winter months as a holiday treat. They learned about hoshigaki after visiting Otow’s Orchard, a family-owned orchard that has been growing persimmon varieties in Granite Bay for over 100 years, said Alex.

A few generations ago, the Hachiya varietal was very popular but “because it’s so soft, it’s not easily shipped which is why you rarely find it in the grocery stores,” Greg said. “It’s a fruit of patience, but it’s so worth the wait.”

Focusing on short growth periods

Rancho Roots focuses on quick growing crops that take anywhere from 30 to 60 days to mature, that way the Kerekezes can get multiple plantings from the land throughout the year. Baby lettuce, arugula, kale, beet greens, and baby chard are mainstays. They grow patches of sunflower, pinto beans and green bunching onions grouped in threes. During the summer months they grow tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. They also have a perennial “herb walkway” that includes lemon balm, thyme, oregano varieties, culinary and white sage, lavender, and edible flowers that they can sell fresh or dry-blended into their teas.

The Kerekezes use permaculture philosophy that mimics nature in that they look at their farm as a sort of “food forest.”

“You want things growing at different levels, you want different kinds and varieties, different species, so that if one thing is having trouble you can always falls back on something else,” Alex said. “In addition to having multiple varieties, we try and spread out the crops in different patterns, so you’ll see a lot of crops on repeat in different places. That helps us learn where which crops grow better.”

Notably, the Kerekezes have developed a sustainable way to produce their own organic compost for the farm by incorporating a “bunny system.” They started with three rabbits in June 2019, developing the idea of raising them in movable hutches with wire bottoms set atop the ground, leaving plant and grass material accessible to the rabbits as food. By allowing the rabbits to munch down the beds that need to be turned over, they can in turn use their manure as organic compost. Once a bed is turned over, the hutches can be moved to the next patch of land in need of nutrients before planting. They have grown the system to 40 rabbits in different stages of growth, with two breeding males and four breeding females. They have more recently added a dozen chickens and about 50 quail to their animals.

The Kerekezes are huge proponents of seed saving, which they say is a part of the “true narrative” of growing your own food, meaning seeing a plant from seed to harvest, then seed again.

“Over time, we can have the peace of mind that the crop that produced those seeds has acclimated to the Sacramento weather and the growing conditions we have specifically right her in this area of Rancho Cordova,” Alex said. “The more generations saved from seed, the better those crops are going to be over time.”

Saving seeds is a huge part of what they share with the preschool program as well. The seeds they don’t plant are often used for the kids to handle, to dig holes for and plant themselves. The planting of seeds shows something very complex but very simple, according to the Kerekezes.

“It’s imperative that the kids know where their food comes from,” Alex said. “To give that important knowledge to super young people who are trying to figure out what it is to be human, starting there is very empowering.”

Huppert agrees that Cordova Baptist is enriched by Rancho Roots and the opportunity the farm brings to teach children about plants and animals.

The kids call the Kerekezes “farmer Alex and farmer Greg,” said Huppert. “They bring the kids to the farm and educate them about the rabbits, letting them hold the bunnies and dig holes and plant seeds. Last year they found a little baby snake and showed it to all the kids.”

The school gives tomatoes and cucumbers from the farm to the kids for snack time, gifts bags of greens to the parents periodically and bakes bread with the zucchinis.

Huppert said she thinks it is a great resource for kids to see where their food comes from because “when they see it and participate, they’re more likely to eat it.”

This story was originally published July 5, 2020 at 4:00 AM.