A bottle of limoncello contains some contrasts. It looks like summer in a glass, but due to the ripening schedule of our lemon trees, we make it in late fall and winter. A limoncello recipe can take over a month to complete (and years to...
Our tangerine tree isn’t looking so spritely these days. Over the past few months it’s developed a pale, stricken look that has caused some freak-outs (code orange!) here in our garden. Ryan saw the problems first: the cracks and splotches on the trunk, the formerly dark...
“When I moved onto the farm, it was me and my wife trying to find a change of life,” says David Solomon, manager of Stone Farms in Escondido. “I was in advertising. She was doing international sales. I couldn’t handle being in front of a...
Is there a fruit more loaded — with innuendo, with mythological baggage, with outrageously potent nectar — than the fig? Cleopatra fancied them, and Bacchus wore them on his head. Its flowers are actually inside its "fruit." They were the very first Olympic prize, given out...
As herb/fruit/ornamental folk, Ryan and I are prone to bouts of vegetable envy. It flares up at the peak of sweet corn season — oh Instagram, why must you tease us so? — and returns around this time of year, when cold frames are being compared and...
You could say that it's one of the very first important decisions we ever make in our lives, a high-stakes, “choose wisely” kind of childhood moment. We’re talking of course about picking out pumpkins every October: so much hinges on choosing a squash of the right...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when you spend most of the year anxiously awaiting a crop from your garden, you will eventually be up to your eyebrows with that crop, scrambling for ways to eat it all. For some of our friends, it’s...
“I felt like I needed a detox from my life,” Yovana Mendoza explains early into our visit to the Hillcrest Farmer’s Market, moments before cracking open a ‘White Genoa’ fig in the most gorgeous way imaginable. “I was always a really big party girl. Alcohol,...
Happy Autumn Equinox! It’s hard to believe that we launched just one equinox ago on the cusp of spring — and that the tulips and kumquats of March have been replaced by the blushing apple trees, pickling tips and dahlias on dahlias on dahlias of...
“Your thighs are appletrees / whose blossoms touch the sky,” William Carlos Williams writes in his 1920 poem “Portrait of a Lady.” The immortal modernist was born on this day in 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey. (“The sand clings to my lips -- / Which...