Felicia Friesema

All this wretched heat is one long stretch of disappointment for the autumnally inclined among us. Take comfort in the last of the summer bests. The Trazee peaches at Peacock Family Farms are extraordinary and will only be around another week or so, and a few fall favorites have made......

In the 1905 English translation of Vilmorin's The Vegetable Garden, the author says that, "there is waste in not gathering vegetables in the tender state." The Vilmorin dynasty traces its seed-saving and selling fortunes back to Pierre Andrieux, the chief seed supplier and botanist to King Louis XV. The Vilmorin......

It wasn't too long ago -- 10 years, maybe less -- when you couldn't find pitaya, a.k.a. dragonfruit, for under $15 a pound. And that was assuming you could find it at all. Only a handful California farmers even knew what it was, let alone grew it. Those who did......

In the tradition of Americanizing imported agriculture into more marketable, profitable harvests, you might have ended up calling the Kyoho grape the August Gem or the Onyx Queen. Thankfully it had a slow start in Central California in more considerate hands and maintains the name it earned in 1946 in......

Fans of the short season, hard-to-find Gravenstein apple are experiencing a little harvest whiplash this year. A very dry winter and an unexpected streak of very hot weather at the end of May and the beginning of June pushed up the ripening of several types of regional fruit trees, the......

Hoshigaki -- peeled, dried and hand-massaged persimmons -- are an old traditional food, usually reserved for celebrating the New Year. You start the process in the fall, leaving a stem attached when harvesting (stems are usually clipped off to prevent them from damaging other fruit), removing the thin outer layer......

Summer squash aren't a surprise at a June market; they're as ubiquitous as baseball and rattlesnake warnings for hikers. Worse -- or great, depending on your perspective -- they're easy to grow. Perhaps too easy, given how many bags of them quietly appear on neighbors' porches. Farmers know this, and......

Louis Anderman, owner and chief blender of Miracle Mile Bitters, walked up to Terri Kashima of K&K Ranch a couple of weeks ago at the Hollywood market and bought her entire, but diminutive, box of Ume plums. That box had only around 10 pounds of the green and fuzzy plums,......

When you Google Monsanto, the website link has both the company's name and its slogan -- A Sustainable Agriculture Company. It's a website that works very hard from the first click to reframe the conversation around the most controversial issue in worldwide agriculture. Perhaps with good reason. The search was......

Acclaimed American poet William Jay Smith has so far painted the most accurate picture of the morel mushroom, in a short excerpt from his 1969 nature poems series. "Not ringed but rare, not gilled but polyp-like, having sprung up overnight -- these mushrooms of the gods, resembling human organs uprooted,......