art | Mountain View Organics

Kiln Build and Firings

Cone 6 oxidation firing

New Still for Hydrosols

Organic Rosa Damascena

The plant matter used in the distillation process imparts the hydrosol with the water-soluble aromatic and therapeutic properties of the plant. Particles of essential oil remain in our hydrosols, fully enhancing the benefits of each plant being distilled. Our hydrosols are steam-distilled using botanicals grown on our organic farm in the Shasta Valley.

Popcorn

Our fresh organic locally grown popcorn is the best!!!

Making Sorghum Syrup

Motorized cane press…we used a bicycle hooked to a belt drive last year!

Boiling sorghum cane juice to make syrup! We produced 15 gallons of syrup this year from eight 70 foot rows of sorghum! The syrup can be used in place of any recipe calling for syrup, honey, or molasses. With slight recipe adjustments it can replace brown and/or cane sugar. Sorghum syrup contains vitamins and minerals, as well as antioxidants, and has a lower glycemic index than sugar. It’s great in cornbread!!!

Strawberries

Early spring weeding and mulching brought us many delicious harvests of fresh organic strawberries!!

Tart Cherries

This one tree produced SOOO many beautiful tart cherries! We froze them with the pits inside since they produce at a time when we can’t get to processing them immediately. We made a few cherry pies for Thanksgiving and still have about a dozen gallon bags in the freezer! We will press the juice and use it for making cherry soda with 2 ingredients: tart cherry juice and carbonated water. They also make excellent cherry jelly!

Apricots

The three apricot trees produce an abundance of juicy sweet organic fruit! We don’t always take the pictures that tell the whole story, since we get caught up in the doing of it all. A highlight was a day spent with Lynda and Trudy, making apricot preserves! I believe we canned about 80 pints that day!!!

These mourning doves have been around for as long as I can remember. There were only two at first, now there’s at least a dozen. There are other bird friends to the farm, as well. We share the fruit with them.

Potatoes

Onions

Five 250′ double rows of onions were planted in 2025. They were the best ever and a hit at Berryvale and the Mount Shasta Farmers’ Market!

New Flock of Chicks

Back in June, twenty three baby chicks arrived alive and well through the US Postal Service from Sand Hill Preservation Center in Iowa. Their mission is to preserve heritage poultry breeds. We have Black Australorp and Red Dorking and will allow them to interbreed, as they are both mild-mannered birds, and duel-purpose (both eggs and meat). We were surprised to find the score of eggs, as the weather was changing and the birds were still young. Each day we pick up between six and ten eggs, all through the winter! Such great birds and so beautiful too! So, of the twenty three original birds there turned out to be eleven roosters. As they grew, the space was not conducive to housing them all together and some were getting a little feisty with one another about who’s top rooster! Watching their interactions closely, we chose three roosters to stay and breed with the remaining twelve hens. They were chosen based on their manners. Two of the Australorps would hang out by the willow tree and stay out of the drama and the Red Dorking rooster was chosen because he was the only Dorking rooster, and we want to have some of his genetics going forward. He’s also The first rooster we identified back when he was just a little chick! His comb was bigger than the rest and he was always curious! So, eight roosters were harvested in December, at six months old, weighing between 4.5 and 6 lbs each. The flock is settled with plenty of room to roam in the sunshine, shade or up in the trees. Let’s see if we have any baby chicks born this coming spring!

Reorganizing and Building

The old greenhouse is down, the earth was leveled, trenched, and prepped for a new greenhouse build. The plan is to build a high functioning greenhouse, capable of producing food year-round. The straw bales are building blocks for various projects coming up this spring. We’ll see how far we get with all of our plans, but definitely will be making infrastructure a primary focus this coming season.

To make room for the cold storage/prep area behind the greenhouse, we moved this 16’x10′ shed on rollers, which were essentially just long metal poles. Jeff pushed from behind with the tractor and we used an old pallet jack at the other end. As the shed moved, the poles were replaced at the other end to keep it moving. It actually worked out quite well!

Bird eggs and snakes!

The rattler got his head chopped off with a shovel! The two gopher snakes were quite near to one another moving slowly in the warm sun. They are good guys and we like having them around for rodent control. Just can’t risk having the rattlesnakes around though.

Farm and Fields

Here are pictures of the fields throughout the growing season. We are quite busy as we work the farm and don’t always have the camera with us as we go. It was a productive year, growing food for our local community, made available through the Mt. Shasta Farmers’ Market, Berryvale, and Siskiyou Community Food Bank in Yreka.