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This year marks the 50th anniversary of Fairhaven Orchards’ popular fruit stand on Bolsa Road in Hollister. Well-known for its cherries, apricots and walnuts, the family business started in San Jose in 1918 with Croatian farmers Peter and George Rajkovich.
“Peter arrived in the United States in 1915 when he was 17,” said Marie Rajkovich Hoffman, Peter’s granddaughter. “George was already here, and they worked in silver mines and restaurants until they raised enough money to start.”
The business is now run by all three of Peter’s granddaughters, Marie, Nicole Rajkovich, and Julie Rajkovich Gillio, along with their husbands. And they do it under the watchful eye of their mother, Lucille Rajkovich, who married Peter’s son, also named George.
Lucille said the first ranch was on Blackford Lane in San Jose, where the brothers grew prunes. Soon after, they added apricots and two more orchards: on Bascom Avenue in San Jose and Prospect Avenue in Saratoga. By 1956, with Peter’s health failing, sons George and Martin formally took over the day-to-day operation.
By that time, three of four ranches connected to the family had fallen to developers. The original Blackford Lane orchard and a ranch on Paula Lane belonging to Lucille’s family were converted to subdivisions. In 1950, the city took Bascom Ranch through eminent domain to build San Jose City College. By 1958, the state had targeted the Prospect Avenue property for purchase as part of the construction of Highway 85.
In 1958, George and Martin bought their first Hollister property from Bedford Lynn at 4153 Bolsa Lane, an 85-acre ranch a short distance from the current home ranch. It is now Fairhaven’s primary walnut orchard, but it began with cherry and apricot trees.
The family started packing fruit under the Fairhaven name in 1965 and opened one of the first local commercial packing facilities a few years later, taking in cherries from growers across the county.
“This was a transitional time for our family,” said Nichole. “George and his Dad commuted daily between San Jose and Hollister, and they made enough by 1970 to buy our home ranch and move the family here.”
The Farmstand
In 1975, with a growing family and a need for increased income, Lucille began selling directly to customers out of a makeshift stand in her garage.
“My husband brought in a sorting belt,” she said, “and I sorted the cherries and apricots. I started when Nicole was 10 months old and still in a buggy. I’d sell cherries, and Julie and Marie would help.”
Lucille built her sales by placing ads in newspapers as far away as Santa Cruz and having customers sign postcards, which she sent out the following year at the start of the next fruit season. She also guaranteed return customers by ensuring the fruit she was selling was perfect.
“She would sit at her kitchen table,” said Nicole. “She’d be there with a box of apricots and a knife in her hand, wearing a headlamp, cleaning them one by one. Nothing was left that was not edible.”
Lucille also insisted that the fruit was picked at the peak time for selling. And if the pickers did not meet her standards, the fruit was rejected.
“My mom was very particular on what came into the fruit stand,” Julie said. “She wouldn’t stand for anything other than premium fruit. I think the people who were doing the picking were a little scared of her.”
That level of quality, Julie said, helped define the business and distinguish the Fairhaven stand.
“Supermarket cherries are already a week old when you buy them,” she said. “At roadside fruit stands, a lot of times they’re seconds. They’re not getting premium fruit ripe off the tree. Lucille’s strict standards meant that whatever did not sell the first day would be sold at half price the next.
“We were building a reputation,” she said. “I wouldn’t ever put anything out there that didn’t reflect what we were all about. I was born in cherries. Maybe the customer could not tell it was yesterday’s fruit, but I could.”
In the off-season, Lucille would travel with her friend Lilly Shimonishi, delivering dried apricots throughout the state. They would get up in the morning, sort the fruit, and then head off in a station wagon.
George and Martin built a permanent fruit stand, the “Big Red Barn,” in 1983 and began wholesaling to fruit sellers in Hollister, Gilroy, Santa Cruz, Monterey and beyond. The stand is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the season. Each day, the workers start picking the fruit at 6 a.m., and it arrives at the stand by 9 a.m. for sorting.
“Mom and dad only had about four vacations in 58 years of marriage,” Julie said. “So the fruit stand was our summer vacation and our summer camp. It was hard work, but we always had friends at the barn helping out. It was fun for them and us, too.”
Seasonal Goodness
The Fairhaven stand begins the season at the end of May with six varieties of cherries. About 90% of the cherries go to other markets, but Fairhaven holds the best and the freshest for their drop-in customers.
The Bing Cherry is the biggest seller, but the sweet and crunchy Black Pearl cherry and the large Black Helens are the most popular. They also have the blush-colored Rainier cherries, with a touch of peach flavor, the soft Tartarian cherry, perfect for preserves and pies, and the Van, a cherry that also serves as one of the pollinators in the orchard.
The apricot season starts around July 4 with the Royal Blenheim, the only variety Fairhaven grows. Grown primarily in San Benito County, the Bleinheim requires a specific “prime soil,” and Fairhaven has some of the best. Only two other locations in the state can match it.
When George died in 2007, Lucille became tired of running the business. She told Nichole, “We don’t need to keep doing this.” Nichole asked her mother to give it another five years, and she and her brother Pete started working full time at the orchard. The five years have now stretched to 18.
“Pete was our main farmer,” Nichole said. “A lot of the infrastructure within the orchards today, the cover crop and some special farming practices were all implemented by Pete. One of our orchards was his test project, and it’s just beautiful.”
Fairhaven particularly depends on the Espinoza family, members of which have been working at the orchard for four generations.
“The first gentleman that worked for us was Balthazar,” Lucille said. “Now all his relatives work here. All the uncles and sons and cousins, they’re all related to him and they’re the greatest team.”
Pete died in 2021, and the sisters and their husbands banded together to keep the orchard going, though Marie said it would have been easy for them to close it down.
“We could have leased it out for someone else to farm,” Marie said. “But we held on to it, not only for the employees who work and live here, but also to keep my dad and brother’s memory alive. They built this place, and we didn’t want that legacy just to disappear.”
Existing plans for the realignment of Hwy 25 threaten to make at least the Fairhaven apricot orchard “disappear,” a throwback to the properties lost to the Rajkovich family over the last century in San Jose. The work would cut through half of their lands, removing apricot and walnut trees.
According to Marie, Fairhaven is an “apricot-driven business.” If the apricots were gone, she said, the fruit stand would most likely close.
“One of the Calrans people told me we could go and grow trees somewhere else,” she said. “That’s all good and fine, but there’s no prime ag available anywhere else to purchase, there’s a six-year nurturing process with an orchard, and it’s very expensive.”
The Council of San Benito County Governments (COG) was invited to a May 12 tour of farmlands impacted by the realignment project, including Fairhaven. At its meeting on May 19, COG voted to identify and analyze other means of expanding Hwy 25.
Caltrans is not guaranteed to change its plans, but Nicole is hopeful.
“Their decision could be good for us,” she said. “When our prime ag land disappears, when you pave over it, there’s no way to get it back. All of us grew up in this business. There’s a lot of memories here.”
Fairhaven Orchards
1448 Bolsa Road, CA-25
Hollister
(831) 637-4221
The fruit stand is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. into July. Sales during the rest of the year are by appointment. Online ordering for dried fruit is available year-round.
Recommendations for future Eat, Drink, Savor articles can be emailed to roberteliason@benitolink.com.
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