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Spring Swooning for Summer Fruit

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By Heidi Lewis Here they come, rolling into town— They get the hungriest looks from, everyone around— [drum fill…] Hey, hey, they’re the summer fruits! And they’re super duper cute! It may not quite be summer—but that point is moot! When summer fruits start to arrive in May, there’s a bit of a giddy vibe [...]

The Care and Feeding of Kiwis

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By Heidi Lewis (Throat clearing.) “Excuse me—we have a strict ‘no pet’ policy here.” “I don’t have any pets.” “What do you call that cute, fuzzy brown thing that you are petting?” “A kiwifruit.” (Pause.) “Oh.” Many marketing and branding folks know the story of the kiwi. Grown wild for centuries in southern China, a [...]

April is the Not-So-Nicest Month

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By Heidi Lewis The National Cherry Blossom Festival was recently held in Washington, D.C. This year’s festival commemorated the centennial of Japan’s gift of 3,000 cherry trees to the U.S. in 1912. The ornamental trees rim West Potomac Park’s Tidal Basin, which reflects their snowy canopy. Their beauty and a slew of special events attract [...]

Take a Bite of a Pixie

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By Chris Mittelstaedt A number of years ago, I made the mistake of telling my young daughters that I had brought home Pixies for us to eat. They gasped in horror. It was during their Peter Pan phase, and I had been spreading story-dust about the magical fairies and pixies who live with the flocks [...]

Fifth-Generation Family Farm: Friend’s Ranch

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Friend’s Ranch in Ojai, CA, is a regular supplier of Pixie tangerines for The FruitGuys. The Friend family and its descendants (now into its fifth generation of family farming) have been growing fruit in Ojai since the 1880s and tangerines since the 1920s—one of the first California farms to do so. The family planted its [...]

Help Wanted: Pollinators

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By Heidi Lewis It’s spring. Blossoms are abundant. Time to get pollinating in the fruit orchards. But since colony collapse disorder has been decimating the honeybee population, we’ll have to look outside the organization for some help. As they say in the bee biz, “No bees, no honey; no work, no money.” We all admire [...]

Spotlight on the Understudies

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By Heidi Lewis “The show must go on!” is the biggest trope in theater. Some movies about theater, from All About Eve to The Little Rascals to Waiting for Guffman, have great nail-biting third acts. Yet in real life, the show does go on—because behind every great star is a great understudy. Many go unnamed, [...]

Miranda Rights

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By Heidi Lewis Pineapples (Ananas comosus) will be making their first appearance of the year in most FruitGuys cases this week—as a way to spice up the mid-winter variety. When you pick up a pineapple, do you instinctively put it on top of your head? Yeah—me too. I call it the Carmen Miranda Effect, and [...]

Blue, Red, or Orange

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By Heidi Lewis There’s a scene missing from the outtakes reel of The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo some vitamins: “You take the blue pill, the story ends—you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep [...]

Talking About The Weather

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By Chris Mittelstaedt There’s a fast-paced smart device game called “Fingerzilla” that lets you rain Godzilla-like destruction down upon virtual cityscapes and towns using only your finger. While being at the helm of such fiery chaos may make users feel invincible, the truth is that we are all at the mercy of the elements in [...]