GASTRONOMICA | TEXT AND PHOTOS BY GABRIELLA MARKS
There were so many things I didn’t expect when I moved 1,100 miles southeast from San Francisco to the Southwest. I didn’t expect that I’d learn how to grow a garden in the desert. I didn’t expect that six years into my experience, I’d have six chickens and a stretch limo of a daschund-chihuahua mix known as a chiweenie. I never anticipated that I’d be on a first name basis with most of the farmers and ranchers from whom I get groceries on my weekly pilgrimage to the farmers’ market.
I certainly didn’t expect that nestled in the ancient badlands of Chimayó I would be learning about classic European defensive architecture, discovering our natural tendency to form communities, and witnessing the emergence of new traditions that echo and celebrate old ones.
New Mexico is known for blindingly blue skies, mountain horizons, and visibility clear to Colorado—it’s utterly breathtaking how far you can see in this land. And yet the landscape shelters mysteries—hidden and notoriously private communities beyond the main highways that take patience, curiosity, and a GPS to discover. To drink from the well-worn metaphor of the spring in the desert, you’d be amazed at some of the oases concealed behind scraggly coyote fences down rambling washboard dirt roads.
On your first visit to Rancho Manzana, the dramatic mesas of the Chimayó badlands give little hint as to the fertile fields and lush orchards of the property. The contrast is breathtaking: Just three minutes from the parched pink cliffs that border the Juan Medina highway, you’re suddenly surrounded by tranquil green.
Jody Kent-Apple purchased Rancho Manzana from the renowned Ortega rug-weaving family more than 20 years ago and she has painstakingly restored the fields and the buildings, which occupy the southern boundary of the historic Chimayó Plaza del Cerro. Dating from the early Spanish settlers of the 1700s, the Plaza was essentially a town square—an area of land bordered by a connected series of buildings—that served as residence, social space, farming land, and defensive protection for the families that lived there.
Today, Rancho Manzana is a bed and breakfast surrounded by orchards, birdsong, and fertile fields sown for harvest. A few years ago Brett Ellison and Alexis Elton, inspired by their experience working with nearby Gemini Farms, joined Kent-Apple at Rancho Manzana to revive the agricultural heritage of the Plaza. The couple are a new breed of farmers, members of a movement that has been gaining momentum for years, based on small-scale, sustainable farming practices.
But Ellison and Elton take “back to the land” much further forward. Their philosophy is not just about seeds and soil, about getting dirty and growing good food. It is also an aesthetic approach, a romantic vision of a certain way of being. You can see it in the old Plaza post office now converted to an art studio where Elton, a graduate of the the Art Institute of Chicago, builds organic sculptures.
Their Aliss-Chalmers tractor in Technicolor orange is the most iconic symbol of their unique way of doing things. From 1914 to the early 1980s, the name Aliss-Chalmers was synonymous with farming tractors. Today they are the very definition of old school: Instead of the lumbering combine behemoths of industrial farming, they are human-sized, with all moving parts accessible and exposed to make them easy to repair by the mechanically inclined. They’d look perfectly at home in front of an antique store, yet they are fully functional, useful, and in high demand these days for small farms like Rancho Manzana.
Ellison’s love for the Aliss-Chalmers extends beyond the simple satisfaction of using a perfectly good tool. He wants to move away from reliance on fossil fuels and convert the tractor to a new kind of hybrid, fitting it with a solar battery that will both drive the engine and provide a mobile power source for other tools on remote areas of the farm.
The return to antique tools and methods brings another, richer component back to working the land: the need for, and celebration of, working together. As Ellison puts it, you simply can’t do it alone. There are times in the farming calendar when you need your neighbors and friends to help out on the big jobs—tilling the fields, sowing the seeds, reaping the harvest. According to Ellison, working together—for instance, when the Channing brothers and their team of mules from Gemini Farms helped him plant this season’s potatoes—is not only a more fulfilling way to get things done, it is often the only way to accomplish all of the tasks that bring produce to market.
Community is also the primary motivation at the heart of Elton and Ellison’s plans to begin a dinner series this summer at Rancho Manzana. For their version of Farm to Table, they are expanding the “kitchen garden” to grow a bounty of produce—a greater variety of vegetables and herbs than the crops they bring to market—in order to create and host locally-sourced dinner evenings at the Rancho.
“We’re looking to form a new bond in the customer-to-grower dialogue.” says Elton. “These dinners will be an intimate space for educating and supporting one another, farmer to mouth. Through this we would like to think that we are creating awareness of what it means to support local agriculture.”
The kind of dinner memories are made of: amazing food, grown within eyesight of the dinner table, surrounded by blooming wisteria vines and good friends on a summer evening. Dishes include: oven-baked winter squash with garlic and parsley, achiote shrimp on homemade tostadas, slow-cooked goat stew, and capirotada with pistachios and dried fruits—a fancy bread pudding to die for.
Given her background in art, Elton also wants these evenings to appeal to all of the senses, to the eyes as well as to the palate, and therefore will include art exhibits as part of the event. It’s a compelling idea, to bring people together to enjoy good food and each other, to experience first-hand the land their food comes from, to taste delicious recipes made from just-picked produce, and to appreciate artwork inspired by the land.
Such evenings took place in the Plaza centuries ago. No doubt Ellison and Elton are growing more than the corn and chile that were the predominant crops in bygone days—and the art is more abstract than the rugs the Ortegas wove there for generations—but given that the spirit is the same, generations of Plaza residents would feel right at home tonight at Rancho Manzana.
From the Summer 2012 issue
