Before it was known as the Silicon Valley, Santa Clara county grew crops and raised livestock for the entire country and exported products throughout the world. The springtime beauty of the flowering orchards and the variety of crops grown here from the 1880’s through the 1960s made the area a lush paradise.

Beautiful and profitable, the ranches and farms gave way in the 60’s to IT firms like IBM and were followed by Google, Cisco, Adobe, and Apple. With the new firms came suburbs to house all those workers and places like Cupertino and Los Altos, Campbell and Milpitas became extensions of old towns like San Jose and Palo Alto. While the houses seemed to sprout like the crops used to, the valley is not completely lost to asphalt and cement. To the South and east of San Jose the land continues to be farmland and woodland. Open space purchases have preserved the natural habitat of the area.

Today I’m headed about 15 miles south of downtown San Jose to the Coyote Creek Open Space Preserve. The wooded area is adjacent to land that has been farmed for over120 years. The farm with the biggest signage is Spina Farms at the corner of Santa Teresa and Bailey. Many locals know if for its fall pumpkins. Down here between San Jose and Morgan Hill we run into old agricultural Santa Clara county.

I ran into some recently disked (turned over) farmland on my way the preserve. The spring always brings wild mustard that not only brightens up the area it provides needed ground cover for later in the summer when the months of heat without rain  would result in the topsoil being swept away by the daily breeze coming in from the San Francisco Bay. Passing the orchard and the mustard, visitors are greeted by a venerable oak tree. As in most of California we have both live oak and black oak. Anytime you leave the cities in California you are going to run into an oak tree. The oaks are long lived and provide needed shade during the hot summers in most of the state. They feed the squirrels and provide perches for a variety of birds. Perhaps the oak, not the poppy, should be the state symbol.

Moving beyond the parking lot out 4+ mile walk takes us above the valley on a path that is adjacent to some private property and grazing land for the ongoing cattle industry in the south county.

I’ll be back with some more photos. If you like the little ditty and photos let me know.

A quick note about the cameras for the photos, color photos were taken with a Yashica 124 MatG with the new Kodak Ectachrome (slide or positive film). Black and white photos came from either an 80’s era Canon AE-1 Program 35mm camera or my 50’s era Voightlander Vito B shooting Ultrafine black and white negative film. It was all scanned using an Epson v700 using the holders from a v800, which are vastly superior to the stock holders.