By Julie Trescott

This one-acre orchard dating back to 1900 near the Los Altos History Museum is still regularly maintained.

Even though Los Altos now grows more houses than apricots, there are still several active orchards that recently completed this season’s harvest in the city.

One orchard, on David and Lucile Packard’s original property in Los Altos Hills, is now maintained by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which provides grants to nonprofit organizations. The 60-acre orchard changed hands in 2000 after the death of David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett Packard, in 1996.

“The orchard is part of the history of the family,” said Chris Decardy, the foundation’s communications director. “When the property was turned over, the idea was to have the facility be useful to foundation members and not be significantly changed.”

The apricots are picked, sliced, dried and bagged on the property. They are then used at foundation events and sold to foundation staff and neighbors.

“It’s part of the legacy of the neighborliness of the Packard family that the foundation carries on,” Decardy said.

Another reminder of the city’s agricultural past can be seen at the Los Altos History Museum. Constructed by carpenter and orchardist J. Gilbert Smith in 1900, the farmhouse on museum grounds was initially built on a 10-acre orchard and inhabited by Smith and his family until 1954, when it was purchased by the city. It was later established as a historical museum. City orchardist, Don Speciale, maintains the property’s one-acre orchard, accompanied by an apricot-processing exhibit.

“I think that a condition for donating land to the city was that the orchard remain an orchard in perpetuity,” said museum volunteer Judy Dodge.

There are also a few remaining family-owned orchards in Los Altos. Viola Clifford has been cutting apricots for the past 75 years, ever since she was a little girl, at her family’s 10-acre orchard on Los Altos Avenue. Today, her family still owns approximately three acres of orchard, while she owns one and a half acres on Pine Lane.

Los Altos resident Armond King also spent a lot of time picking apricots during the three-week harvest season on Los Altos Avenue, where his aunt and uncle owned an orchard.

He offered advice for apricot picking: “If you’re a picker, you don’t just yank the apricot. You need to rotate it one-eighth of a turn. If it is ripe, it will come off in your hand from the stem.”

The Clifford family now possesses some of the land once owned by the Kings.

Kei Mizuhara, who grew up on State Street, has vivid memories of the city in its early years. “I remember cutting through the orchards and picking an apricot on my way to grammar school,” said Mizuhara of her childhood in sleepy Los Altos during the 1950s.

In that decade, the region once known as the Valley of Hearts Delight for fruit farming became home to a blossoming computer industry and was transformed into the Silicon Valley. Most apricot production was subsequently relocated to the San Joaquin Valley.

“Many of the farmers just barely made enough money to pay their water bills,” King said. “When they were offered half a million dollars for their land, they couldn’t refuse.”

For Mizuhara, the turning point was when the fire station presently located on Almond Avenue replaced a beloved orchard prior to her college departure. “That’s when I noticed my town was changing,” she said.

According to King, the transition was gradual: “The orchards disappeared one at a time.”