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 at The FruitGuys. There’s some flat-out swooning. We have people linked arm-in-arm doing the Monkees “walk”—you might think we’re practicing for a flash mob, but we’re all just rooting for our favorite summer fruit. It can be hard to mediate the favorites—it’s like debating John vs. Paul, Micky vs. Davy, or Posh vs. Sporty Spice.

Strawberries, our fruity rock stars of spring, have already started making an appearance in FruitGuys cases. Their season can reach into fall, weather depending. And we’re just starting to see stone fruit! Our winter citrus stars, like tangerines and grapefruit, will soon be giving up their box cubbies for peaches, plums, cherries, and all the stone fruit celebrities.

Early summer fruit loves spring-fever days (the kind that make you want to play hooky). As we’re just at the start of the season, the fruit trees and plants haven’t completely come into their own yet, and the natural sugars are not yet fully developed—but as we get closer to the season’s peak, you’ll notice the fruit getting sweeter and sweeter.

So if you’ve been daydreaming about summer fruits, here they come!

Strawberries: Strawberries are picked ripe and should be enjoyed as soon as possible. For overnight storage, they may be refrigerated. But don’t wash them until you’re ready to eat them (or freeze them).

Stone Fruit: Stone fruit is climacteric, meaning it continues to ripen after being picked. Let stone fruit ripen at room temperature until it’s fragrant and gives slightly to light pressure. You can turn up the volume on ripening climacteric fruit by placing it in a paper bag with an apple (apples give off ethylene, a plant hormone that accelerates ripening). Stone fruit should be enjoyed once it’s ripe, but it will also keep loose in the crisper drawer of the fridge for a few days.

As always, to see what’s in your mix and where it came from, visit our Mix Pages at fruitguys.com/mix.

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

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 missionary returning to New Zealand in 1904 brought some seeds with her. The rest, as they say, is history. In New Zealand, the kiwi was successfully domesticated, and prospered. In the 1950s, New Zealand exporters wanted to break into U.S. markets, so they renamed the fruit from its English names—Chinese gooseberry and melonette—to kiwifruit. So named after the Maori word for the soft fuzzy bird, which makes the “ki-wiiiii” sound. After the name change, kiwis were a hit!

Kiwis now grow domestically, and many varieties have been bred to tolerate various U.S. climates. They are not self-pollinating, and in fact are dioecious—meaning the plants come in sexes—so pollinator help is needed. Well behaved, kiwis grow on a vine and are often trained to large overhead arbors. They are also easy to transport.

There are numerous cultivars of kiwi—from the common Hayward kiwi, with fuzzy brown skin and green flesh; to those with minimal fuzz and gold flesh; to berry-sized, smooth-skin kiwis—ranging in flavor from sweet to tart-sweet. With all of them, especially kiwi berries, the skin is edible, depending on how adventurous you are. The oil from kiwi seeds contains alpha-linolenic acid, an omega-3 fatty acid, which as a supplement has become an odorless alternative to fish oil. And of course kiwis are vitamin power balls—a medium-size kiwi contains around 120% of the recommended daily value of vitamin C and over 300mg of potassium.

Preparation: Kiwis are ripe when they give slightly to pressure. They’re easy to eat, peeled and sliced, or like an eggcup—cut in half and spooned out. The adventurous smoothie maker can rinse kiwis in cool water, remove small calyx nubs, and throw skin and all into the blender.

Storage: Keep kiwifruit at room temp until ripe. Once ripe, kiwi will keep in the fridge for a couple of days. Very firm kiwi will keep refrigerated for up to two months.

We will have kiwifruit in mixes all across the country this week. To see what’s in your mix and where it came from, visit our Mix Pages at fruitguys.com/mix, and select your region and mix type.

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

P.S. Mark your calendars: National Bike To Work Day is Friday, May 18!

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 about a million visitors to the festival annually.

This year the event was scheduled between March 20 and April 27. Alas, the blossoms peaked nearly a month early due to a warm winter. Ten days later, the walkways were littered with petal drifts.

Have you noticed an earlier than usual flowering of your neighborhood trees? Many U.S. regions have experienced a premature warming trend with a bit more consequence. Coming out early puts fruit blossoms in jeopardy of the last of winter’s wrath. When the soil warms, buds emerge; when the air warms and the blossoms open, the petals fall away, and the tiny fruit sets. At that delicate stage, any frost, hard rain, or hail can easily damage them.

Late spring storms and frosts affected many of our farmers across the country these past weeks. Severe frosts wrecked much of the grape and apple crops of Mick Klug Farm in St. Joseph, MI, and wiped out 75 percent of the apple crop at Nichols Farm & Orchard in Illinois. Hail knocked numerous baby plums to the ground at B&L Farms in Fresno County, CA; and Kauffman’s Fruit Farm cherry orchard in Lancaster County, PA, took a major hit. All these farms are family-run, and damaged crops impact their livelihood.

As The FruitGuys’ buyers assess the impact of the weather on spring fruit, buyer Rebecca North says, “We are still committed to working with these farmers, especially as they may feel the financial impact of these short but not-so-sweet storms. This may mean some aesthetically challenged pieces of fruit in FruitGuys cases. Hail or other weather damage may leave some scarring on the outside, but the inside is still delicious!”

There are numerous interpretations to T.S. Eliot’s quote “April is the cruelest month”—as our farmers well know, none of us are out of reach of winter’s backhand in April.

As always, see what’s in your mix this week and where it came from by visiting our Mix Pages.

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

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 of wild parrots that inhabit the evergreen trees in the northeast corner of San Francisco. I had forgotten my own lore about the little parrot saddles for the young pixies who can’t fly and the secret hiding places and tunnels under North Beach for all the magical creatures. Now, tears were starting to flow.

“No, no,” I said as I pulled out some fruit. “These Pixies are just tangerines.” They looked at them for a moment in wonder. “Do fairies and pixies help them grow?” one of my daughters asked. “They sure do. Let me tell you all about it…”

A magical family in California’s Ojai Valley is to be thanked for the majority of this week’s Pixie crop, fresh from Friend’s Ranch, just north of Ventura and east of Santa Barbara. Although the ranch employs many organic growing practices, Friend’s Pixies aren’t certified organic, so you’ll only find them in our conventional mixes.

In our organic mixes, you’ll see a wide variety of other juicy, delicious citrus offerings: West Coast organic cases feature blood oranges from Pauma Valley Citrus in Valley Center, CA, as well as Cara Caras from Homegrown Organic Farms in Porterville, CA; Southwest organic mixes include navel oranges and tangelos from McClendon’s Select in Peoria, AZ; Central organic cases will feature Minneola tangelos from Cousin’s Farm in Orange Cove, CA, and navel oranges from Sespe Creek Organics in Fillmore, CA; and back East, we’ll have organic Ruby Red grapefruit and Minneola tangelos from California. Check out our mix pages at fruitguys.com/mix and enter your zip code to find your region.

One medium-sized tangerine (about 90 grams) is only around 45 calories and contains about 40% of your vitamin C for the day while providing about 6% of your dietary fiber. That’s truly a magical creature.

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

Tony (third generation) packs Pixies.

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 first Pixie tangerine trees in the early 1970s, many of which still yield fruit today. Friend’s grows a total of 15 varieties of tangerines as well as blood oranges, Meyer lemons, Minneolas, and more. Friend’s Ranch citrus trees range in age from 1 to 90 years old.

Emily (fourth generation) in the Pixie orchard.

Friend’s is a  member of the Ojai Pixie   Growers Association. Although not certified organic, they employ many organic growing practices, such as using compost, horse manure, and beneficial insects. The ranch is made up of five properties comprising 75 acres of citrus, over 18 of which are Ojai Pixies.

Oliver (fifth generation) inspects the Pixies.

Pixie tangerines are naturally seedless and always delicious. One of the sweetest varieties of citrus, Pixies are the most popular fruit at Friend’s Ranch are a favorite among citrus lovers everywhere.  They hold well at room temperature and will keep in the fridge for at least two or three weeks.  Enjoy!

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 the functionality of honeybee hives—the awesome productivity of the bees, the seamless flow of communication, all the great honey products. But frankly, not everyone is cut out to work under a monarchy. Honeybees have iPheromone phones with which they collectively regulate hive temperature, population, and housekeeping chores. They’ve got waggle dances, complex vision, and navigation intelligence to boot. With tens of thousands of bees per hive, that equals a pollination powerhouse.

But let’s say your hive is going through a re-org or supersedure, or getting ready to swarm. It’s a good time to think outside the box and examine the résumés of some independent contractor pollinators:

Bumblebees
These drones are always first to the office. The gentle buzz of bumblebees is the signal that spring has arrived. Darwin called them humble bugs, but don’t let their torpid flight fool you—these bees get in those flowers, buzz away, and get the job done.

Hummingbirds
Able to type 1,000 words per minute, these multi-taskers favor red flowers. Migratory creatures, hummingbirds are able to work between Alaska and Mexico.

Bats
Willing to work the night shift, bats are especially attracted to white flowers. They help pollinate a wide variety of tropical plants, cacti, and more. Their primary strength is in pest control.

Plant for Pollinators
You can help pollinators of all kinds find jobs—choose native plants for your garden that provide forage. BeeSmart is a handy iPhone/Android app that lists region-specific pollinator-friendly plants. Consider creating a habitat where pollinators can nest. Or if you’d like to apply for the job yourself, try running around a meadow sticking your proboscis into flowers.

“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, but some famous ones include Luciano Pavarotti, who made his stunning American debut as an understudy; Shirley MacLaine, who was signed to Paramount Pictures after understudying musical theater star Carol Haney; and Anthony Hopkins, who was understudy for Laurence Olivier. Hopkins not only got curtain calls, but a knighthood.

The FruitGuys employs understudies too. We are committed to our local farmers every season; however, in the winter and especially the spring (when we’re waiting for blooms to turn into summer fruit, and the main spring-specific fresh fruit available is strawberries), variety can wane. Because we are sensitive to your interests in having variety (and not just all winter citrus), we sometimes look to understudies to keep your mix interesting. They are the beautiful fruits from our continental neighbor Mexico and our neighbors two doors down in South America, where it’s summer during our winter.

“We import certain kinds of fruit to provide variety when it’s unavailable locally or domestically,” says Rebecca North, The FruitGuys’ West Coast buyer. Some of our south-of-the-border offerings include colorful mangos, pineapples, and guavas, along with grapes, plums, peaches, nectarines, blueberries, some varieties of melon, and more.

If you ever have questions or concerns about imported fruit, please let us know—we can provide you with more information and/or make adjustments for you ASAP.

Currently we are eagerly waiting and watching for the blossoms in our local farmers’ orchards to turn into sweet fruit. Soon enough, even our Regional TakeHome cases will be available from local farms again. We’re looking forward to sending you their lovely late spring and summer produce as soon as it’s ripe, along with writing about some of these farms and their delicious offerings.

Ultimately, we like our audience to get a good show—a variety of colors, nutrients, and flavors in every case. So today, ladies and gentleman, the part of Plum is being played by… [curtain rises to thunderous applause].

As always, check our mix pages to see what’s in your case and where it came from.

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 you are perfectly within your rights to get a little silly with fruit—here at The FruitGuys we understand that impulse.

Carmen Miranda was inspired to put fruit on her head by the ladies of Bahia, Brazil, who sold fruit at the market. She took on the colorful Baiana style to great success as a superstar in her home country and a megastar here. In 1945, she was one of the highest-earning women in the U.S. It’s all in her 1995 biographical documentary Bananas Is My Business.

Besides inspiring stylish headgear, the pineapple-Carmen combination can really liven things up. Carmen had sparkle, verve, fun, and samba. Pineapples have tropical flavor, enlivening nutrients, and samba. And samba makes everyone smile.

Fresh pineapple contains enough vitamin C and manganese to beat the band (not to mention high levels of vitamin B6 and thiamin), and it also contains bromelain. Bromelain is a proteolytic enzyme and valuable anti-inflammatory that helps the body digest proteins. Most of pineapple’s bromelain is concentrated in its inedible stem and semi-edible core—not the tastiest part of the fruit, but try chewing on the core for a little bromelain boost. My daughter calls it pineapple chewing gum.

If you’re a person who has a little trepidation about stepping out on the dance floor wearing a pineapple, worry no more—you can always eat it. There are many ways to cut a pineapple. In addition to the instructions at right, you can employ a router-like device sold in kitchen stores that makes pineapple rings; or cut off the top, slice into halves lengthwise, cut one-inch grooves top-to-bottom and across, then slice fruit away from the skin (as you might an avocado) leaving a little boat of pineapple chunks. Whatever method you choose, don’t forget to swing your hips.

To see what’s in your region’s mix and where it came from, visit fruitguys.com/mix.

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

How to Cut a Pineapple:

1. Cut off the crown and the base of the pineapple, then stand it upright on the cutting board.
2. Using a sharp knife, carefully cut the peel from top to bottom in strips all the way around the pineapple.
3. Any remaining pineapple “eyes” may be removed using the scoop end of a vegetable peeler or by making very small, angled cuts behind each eye with the long edge of the knife.
4. After removing the peel, cut the pineapple in half lengthwise. Place each half cut-side-down on the cutting board, and cut in half lengthwise again.
5. Carefully slice off the core, cut into bite-size pieces, and enjoy!

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 the rabbit hole goes.” And then a third hand emerges from Morpheus’ black trench coat holding a gleaming, bright-orange kumquat. “Or—you could choose the tangy, orange kumquat. It’s got a powerful, exhilarating taste that will break you out of this 2D world so you can walk out of this theatre and into the sunshine!”

Sadly, The Matrix’s kumquat scene ended up on the cutting-room floor. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy their tangy goodness! Kumquats may not protect you from a rainstorm of bullets or scary agents morphing into your daily life, but 100g of kumquats (around 5 or 6) contains about 44mg (73% DV) of the antioxidant vitamin C, which helps prevent neurodegenerative diseases by removing free radicals. They are also chock-full of other polyphenolic flavonoid antioxidants such as carotenes and lutein.

The name “kumquat” derives from the Cantonese word “gam gwat,” which means “golden orange.” Kumquats have grown in Asia since the 12th century, and they grow well in temperate U.S. citrus zones. If you’ve never enjoyed kumquats before, eating them takes a leap of faith—you pop the whole fruit in your mouth, peel and all (note that kumquats often have a seed or two). When you chew, you will experience the POW! of the original sweet tart.

Preparation:
Rinse kumquats before eating. Roll between fingers to release the essential oil limonene and its uplifting citrus scent. Eat whole (peel and all), or slice and add to salads. Kumquats can be candied or pureed and added to a variety of recipes. They’re also an excellent perk-up to iced tea or water.

Storage:
Kumquats keep well on the counter for 3–4 days but will hold up for a week or more in the fridge. Kumquats keep well on the counter for 3–4 days but will hold up for a week or more in the fridge. (Déjà vu? Whoops—glitch in The Matrix!)

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

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 ways we often forget.

I am always reminded of the basic realities of life when talking with our farmers. Last week, I chatted with Ed Magee, a peach and nectarine grower of ours in Vernalis, CA, who told me about how this year’s extreme dry winter in California would affect his upcoming summer crop. “They officially called it a drought,” he told me. “That means that water is going to get cut back. We don’t know how much yet, but it could be a problem.” He explained that during the last drought, even with his low-flow sprinkler heads designed to conserve water by directing the flow right to the base of the tree, they couldn’t get enough to make the trees flourish. “Once you deny the tree water during a drought year, you’re looking at a good two to three years until that tree comes back with the amount and quality of fruit you were hoping for.” Ed also noted that when droughts hit the region, the way in which water is allocated often means watering less but over more frequent intervals. This costs more for the farmer to manage.

Even in areas where water is abundant, a drought year means higher costs for those who grow our food. Ronnie Gutierrez, of Cruz Ranch in Porterville, CA, grows oranges and satsumas in the winter and plums in the summer. He told us recently that because of the lack of rain, he’s had to use the well water on his property more than expected. His water bill tripled in January alone.

Farming is still tough business, especially for small growers. This year, the anxiety created by wondering if there will be enough water for farming makes many of us wish for an app called “Rainzilla.”

Please check out our mix pages at fruitguys.com/mix to see what’s in season and what’s in your crate this week. From all of us at The FruitGuys and the farmers we work with—thank you for your business.

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!