The lion of Longboat Key
The much feared Marcella Hazan only looked leonine, all mane and sleepily watchful eyes. She was in fact profoundly kind and as likely to maul as the marble lions out front of the New York Public Library.My balls are real
A walk in the park produced two very rare baseballs. That the Lou Gehrig and Vic Willis signatures were forgeries didn't make them any less rare for an avid collector of lost Little League balls.This one’s for Suleiman
Quince paste is drying in a slow oven. It’s taken 18 months to get to this point and the entire venture started as an accident. The recipe used to make it is problematic and the result is proving stubbornly sticky to the touch. Yet it’s so damn delicious that I’d proudly serve it to Suleiman the Great.
When the bare root sapling that provided the quinces was planted as part of a fruit tree allee in the winter of 2010, the plant tag read “Santa Rosa plum.” When the plant that subsequently flowered, leafed out and fruited looked like a Dr. Seuss cartoon of an apple tree, it was clear that this was no plum. The Seuss fruit was a quince.
Raw, quinces are odd and unappealing. The form is bulbous, the skin fuzzy, the body disarmingly hard and light, and the flesh a dry maze of what seems like …
Old soldier driven to drink
What passes for gardening in Los Angeles is a study in waste. Is "urban farming" the answer? One water wonk with four big citrus trees takes the question and many wheelbarrows worth of fruit to a new farmers market to find out.Rubus ursinus: A beary good berry
Click on the 1924 Royal G. Steadman rendering of a youngberry (Source: USDA) to be taken to tomorrow's LA Weekly article on Rubus ursinus, the Pacific blackberry still native to rare, undeveloped pockets of Los Angeles. Its fragrance and intense flavor gave rise to the caviar of summer: boysenberries, youngberries, marionberries and loganberries. Then, if you can, plant one of these brambles, either the straight-up species or a hybrid whose native Western progenitor was named for the bears who love them. The plants are disappearing from commerce as tougher specimens from Eastern and South American stock increasingly dominate the nursery and fresh fruit trades.
North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
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