Paul,

I really enjoyed your article and those beautiful photo's of all the yummy fruits and vegetables! I also have limited space for growing, so a couple of tomato plants each year is about it for me but I love stopping on weekends at our local Farmers Market or a road side stand for the very best in local produce! When my husband and I were driving this past weekend we saw a little mom and pop stand along the side of the road selling Plant City Strawberries. Plant City is a little town here in the central Florida known as the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World and the berries are really good. Many years ago Plant City was a large cotton center but at some point the crops turned to strawberries and apparently 3/4 of the country's mid-winter strawberries come from there. Here in Florida we are very fortunate to have all kinds of fresh fruit and produce grown year round and I am so thankful for the farmers who grow all those yummy crops and their farm stands!

Would you believe that at one time the Pleasant Grove/Lindon area here in Utah produced a lot of strawberries. One of my great grandfathers and his sons had acres of berries. When the berries weren't profitable they planted stone fruits like peaches. As a boy I picked them one summer....not a pleasant job. Our city celebration each June is still called Strawberry Days but the only berries are in small home patches. 1000's of dishes of strawberries and cream are served but the berries come from California. I don't but any until I can pick up a container and they smell like strawberries.

mmm ... Peaches! I love them but probably wouldn't so much if I had the job of picking them! Here in the southern part of the country Georgia is the Peach State, but the sweetest Peaches I've ever had was about 20 years ago and those peaches came from South Carolina. A friend and I were driving to Virginia to visit her parents and we got off the interstate to take a lunch break. On our way back to the highway we saw a roadside stand selling fresh peaches so we stopped and bought a huge basket full. My friends mom made a fresh peach cake that was out of this world good, and we had peaches and ice cream, peaches in fruit salad ... and just peaches!

The celebration of Strawberry Days sounds like fun ... there's an annual Strawberry Festival here in Florida but I haven't been there in years, too much traffic and too much like a theme park anymore. I LOVE California Driscoll Strawberries .... some of the tastiest around and when our Florida berries aren't in season I will always buy Driscoll from California.

I wish we have farm stands here but nothing local. And no farmers market. The only thing to do is to grow your own and of course one can't grow everything.