| Chapter excerpt from Ric Forestiere’s soon-to-be-published remembrances of his Uncle Baldassare Forestiere |
| Forestiere Historical Center Presents Forestiere Underground Gardens |
| Over 100 Years Old! Since 1906 |
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| The Horticulturist |
I DO NOT RECALL the age at which I first learned how to prune grapevines. It was when I was very
young—not more than eight or nine years old. I certainly watched my father prune, imitating him and, no
doubt, making many mistakes. It was, however, Baldassare's magnificent flare for personalizing and
dramatizing even the very simplest of events that made them memorable. Whether those many ordinary
events took place at his Clovis Ranch, his Hump Road Ranch, his Coalinga Mountain Ranch, or at his
Underground Gardens, it was not the place or event itself that was significant, but the man—his wit, his
manner, and his difference, that provided the many-splendored memories.
We learned to expect the walnut harvest season around the Thanksgiving Holidays and the olive
picking season around Christmas and New Year's time. Grape pruning always took place in mid to late
January and was always finished before the end of February. Grape harvesting for drying raisins was almost
always completed before the end of September. Picking wine grapes was a longer season, sometimes
lasting through October. He wanted no grapes picked before their time. They had to be sweetened to just
the right taste with the maximum sugar content.
Only the rectangular slab of the concrete floor of a small ranch house, a single, wild, bitter orange
tree, and a segment of a concrete-lined irrigation ditch remain of the Hump Road Ranch--his once flourishing
vineyard now gone. Along the pronounced hump in the Shaw road, only one half-mile west of his
underground home and gardens, Baldassare had a 20-acre vineyard of Thompson seedless raisin grapes. In
giving directions to seekers, simply calling it the ranch on the hump in the road was all that was needed.
The vineyard once abutted "Hardpan City" on the west, its rows running east and west, parallel to
Shaw Avenue—allowing maximum sun exposure for drying grapes into raisins. On the other side, abutting
Hardpan City farther west was his brother Joseph's ranch where we lived. Hardpan City was a small cluster
of Mexican farm worker families, who owned their own homes and had their own little vegetable gardens.
Almost all of the men, either alone or with their entire family, worked as farm laborers.
It was there at the Hump Road Ranch that I learned the secrets of pruning seedless raisin grapes.
The trick, he had often reminded, was to select the heartiest canes, those most recent year's branches
nearest the old wood of the trunk. At least two branches dubbed canes, sometimes three, on either side of
the trunk was all that needed to remain. Another trick was to keep the trunk from creeping up the vine. And
the third trick was to clip the canes at three to four feet in length. It was as simple as one, two, three. Three
tricks was all it took, he would remind us. Sometimes children from nearby—adjacent Hardpan City ( which
abutted our home ranch as well) and who also went to school with me, would visit in the vineyards or
accompany their fathers, who were farm-workers for Baldassare, as well as for my father.
Pruning wine-grapes was another thing. The only wine-grapes Baldassare grew were on his
underground gardens property. He had planted some 20 acres of Muscats, and several other varieties
behind the underground gardens pump-house. The pruning of the Muscats, along with the Grenache,
Alicante, and Zinfandel, was especially simple—just lop off all the branches except for three on the outward
extensions of the trunk. These, he showed, should be cut to stubs with three buds on each of the most
recent growth of branches. Sometimes, we hurriedly cut off too many, leaving only two short stubs. Now,
he would point out, they looked like a goat-head with two horns. The consolation he offered was that such
mistakes could always be corrected the next pruning time, next year. It was something like getting a bad
haircut. You could always fix it at the next cutting, he concluded.
It was all so simple for us to learn pruning—whether pruning raisin grapes or wine grapes. One was
left with three canes three feet long on either side of the trunk to be wrapped around the vineyard wires; the
others were left with three stubby horns (with three little buds on each of them) on each of the lateral
extensions of the trunk, except of course, when we mistakenly left only two stubs that looked like goat-
heads with two horns. (None of us realized at the time, though, the mystical representation of the religious
Trinitarian symbolism involved in these pruning methods—all in sets of three).
Thompson grapes were usually dried as raisins. Baldassare liked to sun-dry some of his Muscat
grapes into raisins, too. But all the rest of the Muscats, as with all his varietals, were used for making
wine. He never sold his grapes to wineries; they were sold only to individual Italian families in “Little Italy”,
the Italian colony on the west side of Fresno near St. Alphonsus Church. Unlike the rural families, they did
not have space to grow their own grapes, but had to buy their grapes to make their own table wine as did
Baldassare. Without additives or chemicals to promote or arrest fermentation, the crushed grapes
fermented naturally in their cellars from naturally-cultured and produced grapes. Here again, Baldassare
was decades ahead of his time. Today, they would be called “organically-grown” grapes.
I don’t know how much Baldassare charged for his wine grapes, which he sold by the ton or half-ton;
and at times supplemented from my father's vineyards to fill some orders. Without even weighing the
grapes, he estimated 40 picking boxes (when packed down firmly without crushing them) equaled a ton (20
boxes equaled a half-ton, and 10, a quarter-ton) and scaled according to the vat size their cellar would
accommodate. Whatever his price, no one seemed to complain; it was well known that he would rather be
cheated than be a cheater himself. His buyers repeatedly sought and bought his grapes year after year for
their own Sangre di Cristo, pure and unadulterated. Wine referred to as the “Blood of Christ” was a readily
acceptable Eucharistic reference to the liturgical sacred mysteries quite familiar to his fellow countrymen
and those parishioners living near St. Alphonsus Catholic Church—the hub of the Italian Colony of West
Fresno.
All that remains of Uncle Baldassare's wine-grape vineyards and pasture land, which stretched for
most of the half-mile behind his pump house at his underground home and gardens, are remnants of a
driveway from Shaw Avenue southward—diagonally halved by the 99 Freeway. A few remaining trees and
the pump's irrigation pipe sticking up out of the ground are still in place. Below ground, the pump-house is
still intact, the big gasoline engine is still there; and so, presumably, is the centrifugal pump at the bottom of
the angled belt-shaft now buried beneath silt and sand.
Gone, too, are all the cherished grapevines of his vineyards. Gone is the pasture of the sled-horse,
donkey, and milk cow, pairs of goats and mules and stray cottontail rabbits that foraged there—all watered
from the underground pump house. But the memory of them all, plants and animals alike, remains—as
does the memory of the cool, refreshing drinks of water from the side-discharge of well water from the pipe,
from the pump-house beneath the ground.
Baldassare Forestiere had a sincere, abiding reverence for all nature and for nature's Creator, and for
all living plants and animals, great and small. Yet, for plant life he had a special reverence—not just as
symbolic representations of living building blocks of our food chain, but as living sentient creations; as life-
sharing and life-giving ingredients for food which he cultured and cultivated with wonderment and awe.
Whether they were germinating seeds, sprouting shoots, or tender transplants planted in the cool of the
evening, their first waterings were always baptismal waterings. Early the following day, the soil around
tender transplants he affectionately cultivated and lavished with his “benedizione,” —a reverent benediction.
Thereafter, and throughout their maturity, plants, vines, and trees were fed, watered, cultivated, and
never allowed to suffer stress. Cuttings and graftlings were trimmed and pruned with special care and pride.
He became a skilled nurseryman and husbandman. Even if his farming business practices were not always
the most profitable, it was always in the process an act of magnificent poetry. I often saw his younger
brother, my father, follow along the same lines, as if there could no better practice or process than to imitate
his mentor—often more a matter of poetry than profit.
The brothers Forestiere cultivated and produced almost the very same commercial crops: raisin
grapes, wine-grapes, olives, peaches, some walnuts and almonds. But it was Baldassare, who with a
poetic bent, propagated, grafted, and cultivated many additional exotic plants and trees beyond commercial
lines, mostly for the pure delight and magnificence of it all. He selected wild stocks as the parent base.
Whether for citrus, fruit, or nut trees, they were always the host tree for graftings. These were selected as
being the strongest, the heartiest and the most disease and drought resistant. They were used for small
groves and pergolas, for protective arbors, trellises and canopies. Little wonder, then, that such loving care
and attention and selective propagation have assured the survival of most of them to this day—still living and
still fruitful almost 60 years after his death.
young—not more than eight or nine years old. I certainly watched my father prune, imitating him and, no
doubt, making many mistakes. It was, however, Baldassare's magnificent flare for personalizing and
dramatizing even the very simplest of events that made them memorable. Whether those many ordinary
events took place at his Clovis Ranch, his Hump Road Ranch, his Coalinga Mountain Ranch, or at his
Underground Gardens, it was not the place or event itself that was significant, but the man—his wit, his
manner, and his difference, that provided the many-splendored memories.
We learned to expect the walnut harvest season around the Thanksgiving Holidays and the olive
picking season around Christmas and New Year's time. Grape pruning always took place in mid to late
January and was always finished before the end of February. Grape harvesting for drying raisins was almost
always completed before the end of September. Picking wine grapes was a longer season, sometimes
lasting through October. He wanted no grapes picked before their time. They had to be sweetened to just
the right taste with the maximum sugar content.
Only the rectangular slab of the concrete floor of a small ranch house, a single, wild, bitter orange
tree, and a segment of a concrete-lined irrigation ditch remain of the Hump Road Ranch--his once flourishing
vineyard now gone. Along the pronounced hump in the Shaw road, only one half-mile west of his
underground home and gardens, Baldassare had a 20-acre vineyard of Thompson seedless raisin grapes. In
giving directions to seekers, simply calling it the ranch on the hump in the road was all that was needed.
The vineyard once abutted "Hardpan City" on the west, its rows running east and west, parallel to
Shaw Avenue—allowing maximum sun exposure for drying grapes into raisins. On the other side, abutting
Hardpan City farther west was his brother Joseph's ranch where we lived. Hardpan City was a small cluster
of Mexican farm worker families, who owned their own homes and had their own little vegetable gardens.
Almost all of the men, either alone or with their entire family, worked as farm laborers.
It was there at the Hump Road Ranch that I learned the secrets of pruning seedless raisin grapes.
The trick, he had often reminded, was to select the heartiest canes, those most recent year's branches
nearest the old wood of the trunk. At least two branches dubbed canes, sometimes three, on either side of
the trunk was all that needed to remain. Another trick was to keep the trunk from creeping up the vine. And
the third trick was to clip the canes at three to four feet in length. It was as simple as one, two, three. Three
tricks was all it took, he would remind us. Sometimes children from nearby—adjacent Hardpan City ( which
abutted our home ranch as well) and who also went to school with me, would visit in the vineyards or
accompany their fathers, who were farm-workers for Baldassare, as well as for my father.
Pruning wine-grapes was another thing. The only wine-grapes Baldassare grew were on his
underground gardens property. He had planted some 20 acres of Muscats, and several other varieties
behind the underground gardens pump-house. The pruning of the Muscats, along with the Grenache,
Alicante, and Zinfandel, was especially simple—just lop off all the branches except for three on the outward
extensions of the trunk. These, he showed, should be cut to stubs with three buds on each of the most
recent growth of branches. Sometimes, we hurriedly cut off too many, leaving only two short stubs. Now,
he would point out, they looked like a goat-head with two horns. The consolation he offered was that such
mistakes could always be corrected the next pruning time, next year. It was something like getting a bad
haircut. You could always fix it at the next cutting, he concluded.
It was all so simple for us to learn pruning—whether pruning raisin grapes or wine grapes. One was
left with three canes three feet long on either side of the trunk to be wrapped around the vineyard wires; the
others were left with three stubby horns (with three little buds on each of them) on each of the lateral
extensions of the trunk, except of course, when we mistakenly left only two stubs that looked like goat-
heads with two horns. (None of us realized at the time, though, the mystical representation of the religious
Trinitarian symbolism involved in these pruning methods—all in sets of three).
Thompson grapes were usually dried as raisins. Baldassare liked to sun-dry some of his Muscat
grapes into raisins, too. But all the rest of the Muscats, as with all his varietals, were used for making
wine. He never sold his grapes to wineries; they were sold only to individual Italian families in “Little Italy”,
the Italian colony on the west side of Fresno near St. Alphonsus Church. Unlike the rural families, they did
not have space to grow their own grapes, but had to buy their grapes to make their own table wine as did
Baldassare. Without additives or chemicals to promote or arrest fermentation, the crushed grapes
fermented naturally in their cellars from naturally-cultured and produced grapes. Here again, Baldassare
was decades ahead of his time. Today, they would be called “organically-grown” grapes.
I don’t know how much Baldassare charged for his wine grapes, which he sold by the ton or half-ton;
and at times supplemented from my father's vineyards to fill some orders. Without even weighing the
grapes, he estimated 40 picking boxes (when packed down firmly without crushing them) equaled a ton (20
boxes equaled a half-ton, and 10, a quarter-ton) and scaled according to the vat size their cellar would
accommodate. Whatever his price, no one seemed to complain; it was well known that he would rather be
cheated than be a cheater himself. His buyers repeatedly sought and bought his grapes year after year for
their own Sangre di Cristo, pure and unadulterated. Wine referred to as the “Blood of Christ” was a readily
acceptable Eucharistic reference to the liturgical sacred mysteries quite familiar to his fellow countrymen
and those parishioners living near St. Alphonsus Catholic Church—the hub of the Italian Colony of West
Fresno.
All that remains of Uncle Baldassare's wine-grape vineyards and pasture land, which stretched for
most of the half-mile behind his pump house at his underground home and gardens, are remnants of a
driveway from Shaw Avenue southward—diagonally halved by the 99 Freeway. A few remaining trees and
the pump's irrigation pipe sticking up out of the ground are still in place. Below ground, the pump-house is
still intact, the big gasoline engine is still there; and so, presumably, is the centrifugal pump at the bottom of
the angled belt-shaft now buried beneath silt and sand.
Gone, too, are all the cherished grapevines of his vineyards. Gone is the pasture of the sled-horse,
donkey, and milk cow, pairs of goats and mules and stray cottontail rabbits that foraged there—all watered
from the underground pump house. But the memory of them all, plants and animals alike, remains—as
does the memory of the cool, refreshing drinks of water from the side-discharge of well water from the pipe,
from the pump-house beneath the ground.
Baldassare Forestiere had a sincere, abiding reverence for all nature and for nature's Creator, and for
all living plants and animals, great and small. Yet, for plant life he had a special reverence—not just as
symbolic representations of living building blocks of our food chain, but as living sentient creations; as life-
sharing and life-giving ingredients for food which he cultured and cultivated with wonderment and awe.
Whether they were germinating seeds, sprouting shoots, or tender transplants planted in the cool of the
evening, their first waterings were always baptismal waterings. Early the following day, the soil around
tender transplants he affectionately cultivated and lavished with his “benedizione,” —a reverent benediction.
Thereafter, and throughout their maturity, plants, vines, and trees were fed, watered, cultivated, and
never allowed to suffer stress. Cuttings and graftlings were trimmed and pruned with special care and pride.
He became a skilled nurseryman and husbandman. Even if his farming business practices were not always
the most profitable, it was always in the process an act of magnificent poetry. I often saw his younger
brother, my father, follow along the same lines, as if there could no better practice or process than to imitate
his mentor—often more a matter of poetry than profit.
The brothers Forestiere cultivated and produced almost the very same commercial crops: raisin
grapes, wine-grapes, olives, peaches, some walnuts and almonds. But it was Baldassare, who with a
poetic bent, propagated, grafted, and cultivated many additional exotic plants and trees beyond commercial
lines, mostly for the pure delight and magnificence of it all. He selected wild stocks as the parent base.
Whether for citrus, fruit, or nut trees, they were always the host tree for graftings. These were selected as
being the strongest, the heartiest and the most disease and drought resistant. They were used for small
groves and pergolas, for protective arbors, trellises and canopies. Little wonder, then, that such loving care
and attention and selective propagation have assured the survival of most of them to this day—still living and
still fruitful almost 60 years after his death.
| "Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it." --Henry David Thoreau |
Coming Soon ! Would you like to know more about the personal life of the man who built the Underground Gardens? *What was Baldassare Forestiere like? *Was he a hermit?* Did he have friends and neighbors? And what did they think of him? *Did he have other interests? *How did he make a living while building his subterranean world? *Did he ever return to Sicily? *What tragedy led to his untimely death? Find out from one of the last living relatives who knew him--his nephew, Ric Forestiere, in Ric's recollections of his uncle and godfather. A limited number of Ric's unpublished manuscripts will be available for purchase here soon. |
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