Felicia Friesema

It's really too bad that the Jerusalem artichoke, or Sunchoke, comes into peak season right around Valentine's Day. Young lovers, eager to impress and please, peel and prep these drab little roots, detailing to their intended what they found in a quick recipe search on Saveur.com. And truly, it's a......

There's a very good reason that so few farmers are willing to bring purple Brussels sprouts to market. They're a pain to grow. But what makes them a pain also entices customers -- they lack the cabbage funk of your standard green Brussels sprout and have an almost broccoli-like sweetness......

There was high drama in the celery world this past week. Healthy eating advocate, cookbook author and all around nice person Martha Rose Shulman did what she always does -- she penned her New York Times column, Recipes for Health, infusing it with her usual coaxing optimism. Shulman is the......

There has been a collective holding of the breath among California citrus growers following the hard frost we experienced a couple of weeks ago. Frost damage to leafy greens and tender vegetables is immediately apparent, but citrus frost damage is disguised and delayed. It's a nail biting waiting game. The......

Damages from this past week's arctic push haven't been fully assessed yet, but you can be certain that tender greens like spinach and lettuces (already showing higher prices) and the ever-present artichoke harvests are first among the lost. One wild crop that does do well during the occasionally frosty California......

The usual, painfully stereotypical story of success in our town is about the farm girl who comes to L.A. to make it in "showbiz." But the best stories are almost always a twist on the typical. So it goes for Shear Rock Farms, a story about the woman (in this......

Let's forgive the Stinging Nettle -- an herbaceous weed currently popping up all over Southern California following our December rains -- for evolving those highly annoying tiny little hypodermic needles that give it its name. The poor plant has been unceremoniously ripped out of the ground for thousands of years......

During his Nobel Prize banquet, Richard Feynman credited his imagination for continuously dumping him into unknown universes where "nature's pattern of beauty and true majesty revealed." He often found this "true majesty" in fractals -- self-similar patterns often studied by Feynman and his fellow physicists. In nature, and at the......

The watermelon radish, or shinrimei -- a drab celadon on the outside and fuchsia fireworks inside -- is winter's agricultural thermometer. From sow to harvest is about two months, and during that time both the soil and air temp should hover between the upper 60s and 50s. Major shifts in......

Leeks are a pain in the ass to grow, but grow them we do. The white part of the long slender stalk can be meltingly tender, without the sharp acidic snap of the leek's close relatives, the shallot and the onion. That stalk can grow rather tall -- a couple......