Cornered by Highway 85 and Almaden Expressway, whizzing cars, freeway ramps and giant retail stores all within a pumpkin seed's throw of a recently harvested patch of farmland, the ground is fruitful but looks a bit out of place.

"It's pretty rare to see a piece of property that's undeveloped that's in the heart of the city, so to speak," says Daryl Boyd, a city of San Jose planner.

"Across the street from Best Buy" is written just above Charles Territo's name on his business cards, indicating the location of the farm and his business, Territo Farms.

Halloween has passed, the pumpkins are destined for pie filling and it's time for the 24-year-old Territo—who says his pumpkins had character—to carve out some time to rest and close up the fruit stand until spring.

Unable to afford to pay for help, Territo says he does most of the work on the farm himself. He has little free time for the lifestyle many of his friends enjoy.

"I spend a lot of hours working," he says. "From the moment I wake up."

The San Jose native, who says he has been working on farms since he can remember, has been cultivating the land there for the past 2 1/2 years, growing peas, cabbage, beans, eggplant, corn, broccoli and squash.

The farm has been there for much longer than that, though, seeing generations of changes through the 85-year-old eyes of Earl Jio, who farmed there for 50 years prior to Territo. Jio and his wife are still planted in the house that now has a view of Expo and Best Buy instead of the apricot orchards that once dotted the landscape.

Watching the construction of Highway 85 before it opened in 1994, Jio says he learned a lot about the different materials that went into the structure. While tending to his crops in the fields that run adjacent to the freeway, he would talk to the workers building the road, quizzing them about the soils and other structural pieces.

He also remembers when busy eight-lane Almaden Expressway—on which more than 150,000 cars travel daily, according to Santa Clara County—was a quiet, two-lane road.

"You used to see a couple of cars in an hour," Jio says. "Now you see nothing but cars."

As the cars blur past him, so did the time when the Los Gatos-born Jio had the opportunity to buy the land. Many people he has met over the years at the fruit stand assumed he owned the property, he says.

"People think I have big money," Jio says. "But I don't have big money."

A banker approached him many years ago, Jio says, who offered to help him arrange the financing to purchase the land.

"I should have bought this place," he says, smiling. Shrugging his shoulders, he adds, "But I was working too hard."

Instead, the land changed hands a couple of times, and it is now owned by San Jose­based Arcadia Development, with portions belonging to Santa Clara Valley Water District.

In spite of a developer owning a little more than 43 acres of valuable open space in a crowded city (only 6,300 acres of San Jose's 177.4 square miles remain as developable land), the site sits devoid of a more familiar landscape of condominiums, shopping plazas or housing developments.

There is pending litigation over the site, which was rezoned in 1998 to allow for development of a maximum of 350,000 square feet of commercial space or up to 400-unit residential space or some combination that would comply with city transportation requirements.

"We would love to be developing it," says Sheryl Standridge, Arcadia spokeswoman. "It's in the holding stage."

Yet Boyd, from the city planning office, is not surprised by the land's status and says that Arcadia is known for taking its time developing.

"I've actually heard [the property owner] say 'No one is making any more land,'" he says.

Until development can begin, Standridge says Arcadia wants to avoid the vacant property turning into a fire hazard or a dumping ground, so it leases the land to farmers.

"But it won't be that way forever," Boyd says.

In the meantime, Jio will sit back and watch the young farmer work the land, and says the dusk-to-dawn worker Territo "does good work," much as he once did. But the now-retired Jio laughs as he says of himself, "Now, I'm a lazy bum."