O.C. Q&A: Agriculture Edition

Ocean View Mushroom Growers. (Photo courtesy Mary Urashima)

Q: I'm told Huntington Beach had an indoor mushroom farm. True?

A: There was, indeed, fungus among us. Ocean View Mushroom Growers had 36 dark, air-conditioned growing houses full of compost and mushrooms. The compost was made from a pungent blend of race track bedding, wine residue, cow belly and chicken manure, and pickers wore lighted miners’ helmets so they could work in near-darkness. Owner Victor Di Stefano, grew up around the mushroom business in Pennsylvania and, after serving part of his WWII Navy hitch in Southern California, decided to settle here and go into the business himself. By the mid-1950s he’d settled on a parcel on Golden West St., north of Ellis Ave. He had 220,000 square feet of growing space, and a good crop yielded five pounds of mushrooms per square foot. When the farm shut down in the 1980s, the city began a long battle to acquire the property. A lot of locals who were used to the farm’s smell had to hold their noses for the gross construction/development expenditures for the city Sports Complex that replaced it. 

Q: Was Orange County ever a wine region?

A: The padres at Mission San Juan Capistrano grew “mission grapes” for a dessert-type wine, some of the Ranchos had vines, and the Los Angeles Vineyard Society founded Anaheim in the 1850s as a vineyard and winemaking colony. But the industry ground to a halt in 1885, when a Pierce’s Disease wiped out most of the vines. But occasionally, hobbyists or entrepreneurs would make wine from non-local grapes. My favorite local label (not the wine, I just like the labels) was Trabuco Loud Mouth, made in Holy Jim Canyon until a 1980 brush fire destroyed the wine press. Today, a handful of local winemakers today include the Laguna Canyon Winery, Newport Beach Vineyards & Winery, Hamilton Oaks Vineyard in Trabuco Canyon, and the Pozzuoli Vineyard & Winery in Tustin. 

Q: Was the Hass avocado really developed in La Habra?

A: Almost. This most popular of all avocado varieties was developed by mailman Rudolph Hass (rhymes with the thing you sit on) in a small grove at his home in La Habra Heights, just over the border into Los Angeles County. All Hass avocado trees today descend from a single seed he planted there in 1926. Rudy's mail route was in La Habra, so some folks assumed his tree was located there too. The mother tree finally died and was cut down in 2002.