What’s Good in Winter

(Besides Sweaters and Staying Inside)

Radicchio season is upon us.

Those jewel-toned leaves? They’re not just salad filler. Our local growers are bringing in a parade of varieties — Chioggia, Verona, Treviso, and the occasional Castelfranco that looks like a floral arrangement masquerading as a vegetable. Bitter, crunchy, complex… radicchio is the winter vegetable for people who like personality.

Apples and pears are having their moment.

This is peak storage-fruit season — not “the last sad apple in the crisper” energy, but crisp, perfumed, and wildly flavorful. Look forward to bountiful harvests from Kiyokawa Orchards, a family-run Hood River farm founded in 1911 and still operated by the same family more than a century later. Their apples and pears arrive at the shop impossibly fresh: juicy Honeycrisps, floral Comice pears, and heirloom varieties that taste like fall refusing to give up.

And then there’s citrus.

Winter is basically one long countdown to peak citrus. We’ll have mandarins, Cara Caras, blood oranges, and the kind of grapefruits that make you briefly consider becoming a person who segments fruit with a paring knife. It’s edible sunlight disguised as fruit.

And yes, we’ll still have kale and potatoes…

but we promise that’s not the whole story.

Stop by the shop anytime this season to see what’s just arrived — new radicchios, surprise citrus varieties, those Kiyokawa apples and pears, and the occasional “how is this even real” specialty item. We keep things moving, so what you see one week might not be here the next.

Plus, keep an eye on the newsletter: we’ll be sharing winter-friendly recipes and low-effort, high-reward ways to turn the cold-weather produce doldrums into… well, something you actually look forward to.

Photos via @kiyokawafamilyorchards and @gatheringtogetherfarm