History has shown time and time again that bananas and ice cream work well as a team. Banana splits. Banana-flavored ice cream. Ice cream-flavored bananas.
As unreal as the latter sounds, the Blue Java banana—known for its ice cream-esque consistency and vanilla flavor—is just as real as any fruit grown at Dewlson Family Farm in Santa Maria.
Although the farm’s primary commercial crop is lemons, with about 6,000 lemon trees sprawled across more than 40 acres, one area of the venue was specifically carved out by its owners to grow exotic fruits.
“I try to find unusual things that people have not heard of,” said Judy Paulson, who owns and operates Dewlson Family Farm with her husband, Ron Dewey. “‘Dewlson’ is a combination of our names that just stuck.”
The aforementioned “ice cream banana” is just one of several exotic fruits grown at the farm, which also nurtures caviar limes (also known as finger limes) and Buddha’s hand—a unique citron variety traditionally given as a religious offering in Buddhist temples, Paulson explained during a tour of her garden.
“People also use it for its fragrance,” Paulson said of Buddha’s hand. “If you scratch it, you’ll get a fragrance, and it lasts for weeks. You can have it in your kitchen and just go by and scratch it every once in a while.”
Paulson and her husband periodically host tours of their farm property, with three tour options for visitors to choose from. One tour takes attendees through Dewlson Family Farm’s “Exotica” section, where trees, plants, and shrubs from around the world are grown. The other two tours are dedicated to tea and coffee plants grown at the farm.
“Coffee is not normally grown here, so we’ve created an artificial environment for the coffee,” said Paulson, whose tented coffee dome houses five varieties of Arabica coffee.
One of the coffee varieties Paulson said that she and her husband are most proud of growing is Geisha coffee, for a handful of reasons.
“Geisha coffee is the most expensive coffee in the world, and we now know why it’s so expensive—it’s very difficult to grow,” Paulson said, while standing next to the prized coffee plant. “It’s very spindly … and temperamental, so we’re constantly worried about it. It’s just a tough, tough plant to grow in comparison to the other ones.”
One thing that some attendees—whether they’re coffee aficionados or not—of the Dewlson Family Farm’s coffee tours will likely be surprised to learn is that a coffee bean is essentially a seed, the stone pit of a fruit often referred to as a coffee cherry.
“Coffee is a fruit, this is the seed,” Paulson said, while squeezing the pit, or coffee bean, from a coffee cherry in her hand. “They’ve called it coffee beans because that’s what it looks like, but really it’s a seed.”
Each coffee tour at Dewlson Family Farm ends with a coffee tasting, in the same way tea tours at the venue end with a tea tasting. Three different varieties of tea are grown at the farm, and tour attendees get to bag their own tea blends to take home after their visit.
All three tour options are usually offered on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and they’re available to book on the Dewlson Family Farm’s website.
Dewey and Paulson, who have been together for more than 30 years, both worked for the U.S. Navy before becoming first-generation farmers. After the husband-and-wife duo retired, they decided to follow their mutual dream of starting their own farm in the Santa Maria Valley.
“We decided we wanted to do a family farm, so the kids could come and take it over eventually,” said Paulson, whose farm uses solar panels, hawk perches, and other environmentally conscious resources to maintain sustainability.
“We wanted the farm to be sustainable, and something we could hand down to generations.”
Spill the tea with Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 15-22, 2022.