Make It Work: Cooking with Under-Ripe Melons

Photo courtesy iStockphoto/Thinkstock If your garden produces under-ripe watermelon, try your hand at a crisp and refreshing salad: Feta cheese, olives and mint or basil tossed with watermelon chunks. Melons are a challenge to grow around here. Their creeping vines cover lots of land in a suburban setting, and if the rain is wrong, they are […]

Mystery of the Unripe Grapes

Photo by Rick Gush The majority of my grapes this year look like this—unripe—and I can’t figure out why. I’m throwing in the towel: My grapes are not going to ripen this year. The vine is loaded, and there were hundreds of bunches hanging in the sunshine, but only about 5 percent or less of the […]

The Crunchy Grape Harvest

We’ve been eating the first few grapes in the last week, but the big harvest is still a week or two away, and the rainy days we’ve been getting in Liguria lately aren’t speeding things up.