Farm + Market

Healdsburg is full of food secrets. Someone knows who has the best mulberries (the word on the street is Preston and Millbrook Farms). Someone else swears by the broccoli at Noble Goat. There’s a bee person everyone keeps telling me I have to meet—and a seed guy, too.

"Every year on the Thursday before Memorial Day, the streets of Healdsburg fill with music and marching bands, vintage tractors and streamers, and the laughter of the Twilight Parade," writes Liza Gershman in her bi-weekly "Harvest" column. "This is the rhythm of small-town summer: unhurried, joyful, deeply familiar..."

Oysters were a growth process for me. I’ve never been much for foods that require time to “learn to enjoy,” but summer parties on Nantucket often include bountiful trays of oysters and chilled shrimp, and nothing else. And if the evening stretches into a string of gatherings, there is often little else to eat. One night a friend laughed and said, “You’re really missing out on something delicious.”

Even now, in early August, the morning air carries a chill more familiar to spring than high summer heat. Tomato vines hesitated. Peaches took their time. Only this week did the real warmth arrive—sunlight pressing into the ground, drawing out ripeness at last. In my family, this is jam season.