- Author: Pamela M. Geisel
So you may have heard of ”farm to fork” or “farm to table”? Well, I like to think even more locally than that. I think in terms of “backyard to belly” . . . food so fresh you can eat it while standing in the garden without cooking it or with a little more effort, carrying a basket of fresh tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, eggplants, peaches, corn and beans into the kitchen to create wonderful meals for your family.
I have a few tips on getting quality food from your harvest. So often we lose a lot of our homegrown produce because we don’t harvest at the right time. It is important to harvest at the peak of perfection - not before and not after. My worst food experiences from my garden have come from waiting too long to harvest. The...
- Author: Penny Leff
We live in an orchard. It’s pretty much like the California dream that Sunkist and the railroads promised to people back East and to dust bowl refugees many years ago – an orange tree in your own backyard! For many of us in the Sacramento region, the dream came true.
Right now the citrus is ripe. Once you start looking, you see it everywhere – bright navel oranges, juicy grapefruit hanging in clusters, glistening lemons and sweet tangerines – some behind fences and some right out front by the street.
Often the trees are big and old, planted long ago. Much of this urban and suburban fruit doesn’t get harvested; people are too busy, the trees get too tall, or there’s just too much fruit to handle at one time. Meanwhile...
- Author: Jim Coats
Harvest time in California is almost a year-round affair in one area or another: winter lettuce and spinach in Salinas, early spring strawberries along the South Coast, summer squashes, herbs, and tomatoes galore, hays and grains as long as the dry season lasts, and countless other food and fiber crops through the year.
Like grapes, walnuts, apples and olives, the almonds get their turn in autumn. On the right day, you can watch as a Rube Goldberg-like machine rolls through a local nut orchard, grabbing hold of tree trunks one by one and shaking them so hard it'll rattle your bones, but just hard enough to knock loose practically every nut on the tree without damaging its trunk. A sweeper follows next, gathering up nuts in their...
- Author: Judy Sams
How do you use California table olives in your family meals? On pizza? In salads? In Mediterranean dishes? As part of your holiday relish trays?
Today, California is the only U.S. state to commercially produce olives. Over 95 percent of production is canned as California-style black-ripe or green-ripe olives.
California table olive (Olea europaea L.) growers rely on the primary ‘Manzanillo’ cultivar. To assure absolute quality, harvesting is done by hand. Using ladders, crews hand-harvest the olives off each branch, tree by tree. There can be 1,000 olives on a tree, so each crewmember can pick only two or three trees a day. Hand harvesting expenses account for roughly...