How the ‘Johnny Appleseed for sweet peas’ planted colorful flowers along a SLO County highway

This year’s not-so-superbloom of wildflowers in San Luis Obispo County may have peaked in most places, but not so along Highway 46 West this week.

Many of the road-cut hillsides from Green Valley Road eastward are now gently ablaze with swaths of mostly pink and white sweet peas. There are lupine and poppies, too, along with the ubiquitous yellow mustard that can be as tall as an adult human. But the sweet peas are such a surprise.

If you see them, say a silent thank you to the late Miles Barlogio, his four generations of descendants and their desire to share floral beauty with family, friends and passersby.

Decades ago, according to the Jack Creek Farms website, farmer Barlogio began planting sweet pea seeds along Jack Creek Road, just as he had in his own yard.

Then, deciding to widen the effort, he “drove the length of Highway 46 West, planting the seeds on the (road-cut) hillsides as far as he could throw them.”

Covering more territory meant changing the method

To spread the sweet pea seeds higher, grandson Tim Barlogio fashioned a compressed-air planter, thereby allowing the family to expand what is now a floral legacy dedicated to San Luis Obispo County residents and visitors.

In the fall of 1981 or ’82, he thinks, his grandfather “had grown a whole bunch of them for seed … almost a five-gallon bucket full.”

“Grandpa was trying to do it with a slingshot.” Barlogio told The Tribune.

The air compressor would allow them to shoot the seeds way up the bank, he told his grandfather. The powerful seed planter “uses the same principal as a sand blaster,” he said.

At first, he said, “Grandpa didn’t think it would shoot them that far. He was standing quite a ways away from me, turned his back and said ‘Shoot me with it.’ When it blasted him with seeds, he started dancing around, yelling ‘That’ll work! That’ll work!’

“He said the higher the better, because when the seeds pop out, they’d tumble down the hill,” and keep the patches replenished, Tim Barlogio said.

So, one fall day, son David Barlogio drove the farm pickup, Grandpa “sat in the front with that bucket of seed, and I was in the back, shooting the seeds onto the hillsides,” the grandson, now 67, recalled.

The planting excursion took them from Highway 1 to a bit past Vineyard Drive, but Miles Barlogio didn’t stop there.

“He always wanted people to enjoy the flowers,” his grandson said. “Whenever he’d go somewhere, he’d take some seeds with him and toss them out along the way.

“He was like a Johnny Appleseed for sweet peas.”

Thinking about those memories and today’s blooms “makes me smile. They’re so bright and pretty, and they smell so good,” Tim Barlogio said.

He said he and his wife Joy drove over there recently, and after two wet rain seasons, “I was pleasantly surprised by how many more there were this year. We saw so many sweet peas.”

Generations of the Barlogio family still farm their land

The family owns and runs the Jack Creek Ranches, with an extensive farm-stand and store on Highway 46 just west of Vineyard Drive. Open seasonally, it’s due to reopen with a full line of products for the full summer season on Memorial Day, according to the website.

“I still love farming,” Tim Barlogio said. “We’ve planted our grain crop, onions. We’re doing tomatoes today, Indian corn this week and a bunch of winter squash and pumpkins by the end of the month.

“It’s been a battle with the weather this year,” he said, with intermittent storms dumping rain on the fields, skewing the farm’s usual planting schedules. “But as Grandpa always said, ‘Next year will be better.’”

In the meantime, the grandson and his own granddaughters may revive the family tradition later this year. They’ll take out the super planter and make another foray with sweet pea seeds, he said.

The gals (Becky Sumpter and Mandy Evenson) run the Jack Creek Ranches farm stand and help with the crops. Even 5-year-old Callahan Evenson probably will go along to help plant the legume sweet pea seeds. The sixth-generation youngster “loves to ride the tractor with me,” his grandpa said. “If I’m on the tractor and he’s not, he gets grumpy.”

Some other SLO County areas still are ablaze with wildflowers, according to social media postings of such lavish patches as a Nipomo mesa filled with yellow-gold poppy blooms, and an assortment of wildflowers blooming on Cambria’s Fiscalini Ranch Preserve.

Lorienne Schwenk of Cambria reported Monday that “the road to Ragged Point has so many lupine!”

The Carrizo Plain blooms already are fading, though, according to some observers.

But hope springs eternal, like sweet peas. Wildflower fans hope Miles Barlogio was right in saying, “Next year will be better.”