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CapitalPress.com
Friday, April 8, 2022
Shadow Mountain Ranch: Chestnuts take root
By BRENNA WIEGAND
For the Capital Press
SILVERTON, Ore. —
Paul’la Allen’s love aff air
with chestnuts began when
she was a young girl.
“I used to walk through
my neighbor’s cow pasture on
my way to school and I’d have
to push the aff ectionate cows
out of my way,” she said. “One
morning they didn’t meet me;
they were clear across the pas-
ture under these big trees eat-
ing these brown nut things.”
She took a handful to her
neighbor to see if it was OK
for the cows to eat them.
“My neighbor lady was
from Switzerland, and she
taught me all about chest-
nuts; I was late for school,”
Paul’la said. “I found out how
much people love them, and I
became enterprising. The local
grocery store would buy all I
could pick for $5 a bag — and
this was in 1959.
Shadow Mountain Ranch
Growing chestnuts fulfi lls a
childhood dream of Paul’la
Allen. She and husband
Jack Allen own Shadow
Mountain Ranch Chestnut
Orchards near Oregon’s Sil-
ver Falls State Park.
“I’d put them in my
wagon and roll them away
to Multnomah village, which
was probably a mile away,”
she said. “For several years I
was the chestnut girl.”
Fast forward to the late
1980s, when her husband,
Jack, announced he was
ready to retire.
“He asked me where I
wanted to live and what I
wanted to do,” Paul’la said. “I
said I want to live on a farm
and raise chestnuts.
“We’re both from Portland,
and we wanted to fi nd a place
where nobody would bother us
for 50 years,” she said.
They went looking and
found their “little piece of
heaven” high atop the Silver-
ton Hills not far from Silver
Falls State Park.
They named it Shadow
Mountain Ranch and began
going after chestnuts in
earnest.
Jack had been a mortician,
and while he was conducting
graveside services at the old
cemeteries around Portland,
Paul’la would walk around,
teaching her young daughter,
Julie, the ABCs on tombstones
and picking up chestnuts from
under the huge trees they all
seemed to have.
“We revisited all the old
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cemeteries and parks — and
the old cow pasture — gath-
ered nuts, brought them home
and stuck them in the ground,”
she said.
They also approached the
owner of property in Wood-
burn that had the remnants of
the Settlemeier pioneer chest-
nut orchards. Later, when
a large tree went down, he
off ered the wood to the Allens,
who were building their dream
home. They hired a truck to
take the wood to the mill,
where it was dried for a year,
then kiln dried, made into
boards and shaped into their
beautiful kitchen cabinets.
“Chestnut is considered an
exotic wood, and it is pretty
much impervious to rot,” Jack
Allen said. “The American
chestnut is the one the East
Coast settlers all made their
log cabins out of.”
Certain critters like chest-
nuts, too, so rather than plant-
ing the nuts directly in the
fi eld, Jack devised a success-
ful propagation method for
the taproot-based trees, plant-
ing them in 18-by-4-inch PVC
pipes stood on end.
Today their orchards con-
tain over 700 trees on 6 of their
38 acres.
The strictly U-pick opera-
tion has attracted a unique and
loyal clientele.
“We have Asian clients,
who like smaller chestnuts for
their mooncakes; vacationing
Europeans, who prefer big-
ger nuts to roast on top of their
woodstoves, and people from
the Middle East, and they’ve
never seen anything like this,”
Jack said.
HAT Ranch Vineyard:
It’s a labor of love
By HEATHER SMITH THOMAS
For the Capital Press
CALDWELL,
Idaho
— Tim Harless is a retired
Air Force pilot who made
the switch from maneuver-
ing high-speed airplanes to
growing grapes.
When he got out of the
service, he decided to grow
a vineyard as a labor of love.
He is originally from
Wyoming. His great-grand-
parents homesteaded there
in 1902 and started the HAT
Ranch. Their brand was the
shape of a cowboy hat.
Harless was living in
Texas when he became
interested in winemaking
and looked for property that
might have potential as a
vineyard.
“I’d been taking classes
in winemaking and viticul-
ture, but didn’t want to be
in Texas,” he said. “I found
a little piece of property in
Idaho near Caldwell in the
Sunnyslope area. The best
vineyards are on higher
slopes but this one has been
productive.”
Cold air tends to settle in
the valleys, and there can be
a 6-to-8-degree diff erence
from the top to the bottom of
a slope.
The grapes he planted
included Muscat Ottonel.
“I expect about 4 tons per
acre. Every ton of grapes
makes about 150 gallons of
juice or about 63 cases of
wine. I replanted 1½ acres
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to Pinot grigio and Gruner
Veltliner, both white wines.
The Gruner Veltliner orig-
inated in Austria and is
hardy and cold-tolerant,” he
explains.
The rest of the vineyard
is planted to Cabernet Franc,
one of the parent plants to
Cabernet Sauvignon.
“The joke in the wine
industry is that Caber-
net Franc (a red grape) got
together with Sauvignon
Blanc (a white grape) and
created their love child Cab-
ernet Sauvignon. This cross
between the two grapes
blends some of the best
aspects of both,” he said.
“We also planted Tem-
pranillo, a Spanish (primar-
ily Basque) grape. Tempra-
nillo is temperamental and
challenging to grow,” said
Harless.
He prunes the vines him-
self, with his assistant wine-
maker Will Wetmore.
“I had some hired help
but soon realized I couldn’t
train people to prune vines
the way I want. It takes the
two of us 10 to 12 days, 6
hours a day, using electric
pruners.”
The plants each have a
trunk, and vines trained onto
a wire, going 3 feet to the
left and 3 feet to the right.
“The shoots grow 3- to
5-foot length (a cane) and
we cut 90% of that off . It’s
a perennial crop and we
prune the vines every year.
I’ve stuck with one sys-
tem called vertical shoot
positioning (VSP), which
means the shoots try to
grow straight up, hope-
fully between several catch
wires,” he said. “I try to
grow the shoot about 3
to 5 feet long and hope-
fully have 2 to 3 clusters
of grapes on each shoot.
Each plant will have about
6 shoots to the left and 6 to
the right, which means 24
to 30 clusters of fruit.”