“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...
Welcome to Grow the Bouquet, our new series in which brides (and grooms!) tell us about the plants they carried on their wedding day. For our first edition, we're excited to present the beautiful bouquet of our beautiful (and witty and gregarious) friend, Melissa Kushnaryov. When...
Fall 2013 will forever be known as the season that we descended into sheer pumpk-insanity. This madness began with our haul from Bates’ Nut Farm. Remember the Ghostly Lumina white minis, the long-necked squash, and the obscenely large, incredibly orange Prizewinner? And the turban squash...
We live in our parks, and our parks live in us. Parks are where we make loose appointments with friends, where we smooth out our nerves before job interviews, where we introduce our babies to the outside world, and the only place we’ll ever take...
Plants bring us bushels of joy every single day, but around this time of year our thoughts turn to the flora that terrify us. That's right: spooky plants. And we’re not just talking about the sight of our aphid-ravaged milkweed or a fast-moving touch-me-not. In honor of the...
Design sorceress/Greco-Roman disco gladiator Kelly Wearstler must have a gland that produces nothing but inspiration. We swim through images of her work all the time, but there’s one object in particular that we saw inside a Wearstler interior that has been stuck in our craw...
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...
