Felicia Friesema

Wonderful things happened when Australia was ripped away from the rest of the world's landmass around 65 million years ago. That continental isolation yielded some quirky and celebrated evolutionary wonders in both flora and fauna. The platypus and koala get most of the play, but the rainforest fruits of Australia......

Winter squash are summer's last big hurrah. They need all the blazing heat and sun of summer to reach their full potential and are harvested only when their world starts to dip into chilly temperatures, their full, gravid bellies clinging to spent, withering vines. Their thick skins allow them to......

When asked what vegetable we wait for, even pine for, when the cooler weather hits, the answer invariably raises an eyebrow in that, "you're kidding," kind of way. We blame the grocery store. There is just no way to grow the snappy, juicy and yes, seemingly pedestrian sugar snap pea......

Macadamia nuts are not very shelf-stable for two reasons: high sugar content and high oil content. Rancidity is the curse around the corner, so a lot of growers opt to sell to processors who then do a quick roast to help stabilize them for sale. This works great for some......

Thanks to C&H, sugar cane will always be associated with a Hawaiian hibiscus flower in full bloom. For good reason -- Hawaii has the rainfall to support this thirstiest of crops. To grow sugar cane, you need at least six acre-feet (six foot depth over one acre) of water (that's......

The Mission olive's history is one part mystery and one part hardscrabble California survivalism. Olives were brought to the Americas by the Spanish in the 1500s, starting with plantings in South America. The cutting trail eventually landed at the California missions and by the early 1800s, Mission San Diego de......

It's sometimes called a tree melon, but it grows on a 3-foot-tall shrub. It smells like honeydew but tastes like a sweet cucumber. It's a tasty Andean native, both refreshing and pleasantly sweet, but it has never found a large (or very appreciative) audience here in California. A shame, as......

It's been a nice ride for the fruit peddlers of Harry & David. They took one of the world's best dessert pears, the Doyenne du Comice, and, in the tradition of our country's finest marketers, renamed it with the alliterative "Royal Riviera" trademark and built a mail-order empire that has......

Quince, a tart Asian cousin to apples and pears, is a fruit almost like Michelangelo's women -- knobby, with large, nearly muscular curves and sloping, feminine hills that cast interesting shadows across its gravid belly. A natural web of knitted cellulose gives quince its shape as well as its inedibility......

The Lobster mushroom -- it's a fungalian horror story just in time for Halloween, complete with body snatcher metamorphosis, disfigurement and a cheery seasonal orange glow. Imagine the short-stemmed Russula (Russula brevipes) or peppery milk cap (Lactarius piperatus), two edible mushrooms that flourish on the forest floor in deciduous woodlands......