Simona Carini

I learned as much about growing cabbage, corn and zucchini as I did about my neighbors while volunteering at the Happy Forever Community Garden in Berkeley 10 years ago. Calling the 12-by-18-foot traffic diverter on a side street a community garden was a bit of a stretch but the barren diverter-turned-food-producing island taught me a […]

I was not an unusual child in my dreams of traveling to distant places. Geography was one of my favorite subjects in school and the globe a companion to my imagination. When we studied a foreign country, we learned about its mountains and rivers, important cities, industries and agricultural products, but not its traditional foods. […]

Behind my culinary endeavors people expect to see an Italian grandmother on whose knees I learned to cook. My Italian nonna, however, died when I was not yet 2 years old, and my Croatian grandmother never invited me to cook with her, so all the heartwarming stories of cozy cooking sessions across generations that I […]

Some plants have a lot going for them. Take, for example, scarlet runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus). Their clusters of bright scarlet flowers are quite ornamental, the pods can be consumed as snap beans when young or they can be allowed to mature for fresh shell or dry beans. True, the green pods are not particularly […]

When in doubt, ask the farmer. Wondering about the name of a strange-looking vegetable or fruit? Unsure how to prepare some produce you only bought because it looked too beautiful to leave behind? Concerned about properly storing your precious purchase? Ask the farmer. Farmers love the products they grow and bring to market, and I […]

When I buy a basket of strawberries, I put my nose in them and inhale deeply. I smell sun, spring then summer, long days and warm weather. As a child in Italy, strawberry season always felt painfully short and therefore precious. In late March and early April, strawberries broke the monotony of winter fruit — […]

Since 2009, Kevin and Melanie Cunningham of Shakefork Community Farm have been farming on 85 acres in the Van Duzen River floodplain in sunny Carlotta. They cultivate 8 acres of mixed vegetables (from salad greens to brassicas to root vegetables), storage crops and small grains, and manage another 40 acres of grazing land for pastured […]