When you think of a gourd, do you think squash or pumpkin?
How about musical instruments, storage vessels or hand-made art?
The hard-shelled gourd is all of those things, and so much more — and the largest producer of hard-shelled gourds is located in San Diego County.
The Welburn Gourd Farm in Fallbrook produces more than 300,000 gourds per year that are shipped all over the world.
“You can hear that there's a gourd farm in Fallbrook, but it's another thing to visit it and it just blows your mind with how amazing it is,” said Jessica Johnson of the website Hidden San Diego. She discovered the farm about 10 years ago while it was under previous ownership. She recently decided to check it out again and was enchanted.
“You go through the lush drive through the old old oak trees, and then you arrive on this property that's just so healthy. It's such a vibrant, healthy area,” she said. “It really just has an energy of itself.”
Welburn Gourd Farm features a gourd boutique, a mini-animal petting area, art classes, and an organic vegetable garden that is thoughtfully bordered with pollinating plants.
The property also has several historic structures, used as short-term rental properties. Johnson stayed in one of them overnight. “It definitely felt like I was in an old house and just feeling the energy of the house was really incredible,” she said.
Welburn Gourd Farm has been owned and operated since 2022 by Daniel Mole and Jaime Weber, who first visited the property for a picnic. “From the minute that we stepped on to the property, it reminded me very much of my youth growing up around avocado and citrus. My grandfather was an agriculture professor, and my grandparents met at Davis. They were agronomy and agriculture students,” Mole said.
“When Jaime and I came here … it brought me right back to that experience as a kid. And we had been looking for opportunities to get into agriculture,” he said.
And so, “We jumped in the deep end, became gourd farmers … and ‘what is a gourd?’ is the biggest question we get now,” Mole said.
“Gourds are quite ancient. People use them across many cultures around the world. Some are used for musical instruments, some are used for storing grains or liquids, some are used for decorating, ceremonial purposes. A lot of our gourds wind up in Hawaii,” Mole said. “There was a strong connection with this farm … and the hula community in Hawaii.”
Jaime Weber said since they bought the farm, one of the most popular requests has been to bring back art and craft classes.
“The art community is very significant here, too. You can do any art medium on a gourd. You can cut, you can burn, you can paint, you can weave. It's just it's almost unlimited canvas for art,” Weber said.
The high volume of gourds produced at this farm can be attributed to the perfect growing conditions which allow for a long growing season. “We're blessed with great soil conditions here. And that's one of the things that we've been learning about is how to care for our soil in a different way than commercial farming,” Mole said.
They brought in world-renowned organic and biodynamic farming consultant Andrew Beedy to apply science to the property and reintroduce organic matter. “And, just care for our soil and our property in a little different way. Maybe going back in history a little bit how farming used to be done in America. And, it's been very rewarding,” Mole said.
This is Beedy’s first gourd farm. “You have to be challenged,” Beedy said. “The main kind of design point of the garden was how do we respect the history of the Welburn gourd farm and bring that into a new life — And that's incorporating the modernized gourd flower into the layout with the new garden. He is using organic and biodynamic farming practices to modernize an ancient way of gourd farming. “You have to respect the history of a place,” Beedy said.
Mole said history can’t be bought, and he honors the history of the farm.
“I think one of the most interesting things was it was homesteaded in 1880 and was run by really one family until 2024,” he said.
The Garnsey and Day families were the original homesteaders of the land, living on neighboring properties, which were then combined through marriage. A certificate hanging on the wall recognized the farm as a homestead and was signed by President William Henry Harrison in 1892.
In 1914, De Luz’s first post office was built on the property. Louis Garnsey served as the postmaster for 16 years. The post office was known as “the smallest post office in the world.”
As the new owners of a farm that has been producing gourds since the 1880s, Weber and Mole say it has been a learning curve, albeit a very rewarding one.
“We had no idea what gourds were,” Mole said, adding, “I will tell you that when you go to a cocktail party and someone says, ‘what do you do for a living?’ And you say, ‘I'm a gourd farmer.’ It begs a follow up question.”
After a 14-year hiatus, The Welburn Gourd Farm is bringing back the Gourd Festival which runs May 23-25. There will be a gourd competition, beer and wine garden, as well as live music.
