by Sandy Johnson I have the perfect recipe for pesto. It came, quite insistently, from my friend Don. We were friends for 29 years: two generations of journalists working for The Associated Press in Washington. After a chance collaboration when the Soviets shot down a civilian Korean airliner in 1983, Don pretty much adopted me [...]
by Sandy Johnson I was drawn by her name. Juliet. A flirty name for a tomato, especially compared with he-man varietals like German Johnson or Beefmaster or Big Boy. I had grown tired of straight-up grape tomatoes and didn’t want a cherry (so 1980s) so I took a chance. And swooned for Juliet. Is it [...]
by Sandy Johnson Turns out there is a museum for everything. I decided to blog about carrots and wanted a snippet of history so, of course, I googled “carrot history” and discovered the Carrot Museum. Now I’m wildly overeducated and can tell you, with some authority, that the modern carrot originated in Afghanistan 5,000 years ago [...]
by Sandy Johnson We didn’t plant any squash this year. It takes up too much room, the yield is either irritatingly small or aggressively large, yada yada. But in the normal course of events, Mother Nature gave us a volunteer. We watched it set blossoms for weeks, then months, before it finally revealed itself: Zucchini. [...]
by Sandy Johnson It’s illegal to raise chickens within the city of Alexandria. Yet, there they are, a beautifully colored flock of birds, maybe a dozen in all, living large in the city limits. They make me smile every time I see them. For contraband, they’re brazen – they’ve been pecking away alongside a well-traveled [...]
by Charles R. Raasch Raising tomatoes is a wonderfully frustrating hobby. If you expect perfection, it’s not for you. But the payoff is incredibly enticing: To me, there is no greater difference in the food chain between the taste of a home-grown tomato and the mass-produced red orbs you get at the grocery store. We [...]
by Sandy Johnson Gardeners fall in love easily. It is typically a tomato that wins my heart every year. It was the Orange Blossom last year; another year it was the German Johnson. My crush this year is on the Old German. And I’m not talking about CRR (heh, that joke never gets old). The [...]
by Whitney Pipkin As I savored a giant slice of peppered and salted beefsteak tomato the other night — my raw tomato-loathing husband looking at me only slightly disgusted, that’s how good it looked — I found the taste taking me back to summers at my grandmother’s. The entire space of lawn that wrapped around [...]
by Sandy Johnson My colleague Kyle brought cucumbers from her garden to the office, graciously sharing the bounty of her nine (!) plants. These were no ordinary cukes; nay, they were the size of small missiles. Since I failed two years in a row with cucumbers, I snatched one up pronto. With this vision dancing [...]
by Sandy Johnson Remember the days when each fruit and vegetable had its season? You couldn’t get peaches in April, or cherries in February, or sweet corn in May. You had to wait until nearby producers brought their crop in and distributed it, post haste, to every supermarket and neighborhood grocery. We’ve lost the age [...]
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