Olive Groves, Fruit Orchard, Garden, and Greenhouse

Continue up the driveway. After you pass the barn, turn left (West) and walk across the parking lot to have a look at the garden, orchard, and olive grove. Feel free to wander among the trees and plants.

Just West of the barn lies the fruit orchard. Here we grow apples, pears, plums, and blackberries, which go into our jams. These trees were planted by Starcross in the 1980s and continue to bear lots of fruit each summer. 

Behind the orchard sits one of our two organic olive groves. There are 600 olive trees in Teresa Field, named after St. Teresa of Avila.  There are another 1200 trees in Francis Field on the East side of the driveway, named after St. Francis of Assisi. These groves were planted in 2003 and 2001, respectively, and contain seven varieties of Italian olives. 

Each fall we assemble a crew of friends, volunteers, and local employees to harvest olives over the course of two weeks. The olives are picked by hand and cold-pressed in our barn within hours, where it becomes Sister Julie’s Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

We’re quite proud of our robust, prize-winning, artisan olive oil! It has earned 8 gold medals plus 2 Best of Class recognitions from various competitions, including the prestigious Los Angeles International Extra Virgin Olive Oil Competition. Peppery and delicious, our Tuscan blend oil is robust with an intense olive fruit flavor. It is also very high in polyphenols, which are healthy antioxidants naturally found in olive oils. 

To the north of the orchard lies a vegetable garden and a greenhouse where we grow herbs and fresh seasonal produce to sustain people living and working at Starcross. What we don't eat, we sell at our farm stand. If the greenhouse is open, feel free to peek in and see what we're currently growing.