Fresh from Wellspring Charitable Gardens - July 30, 2026

Fresh Today… Summer Squash, Cucumbers, Garlic, Tomatoes, Peppers, Lettuce Mix, Carrots, Rosemary, Chives, Basil, Melons, Grapes, & Peaches

Using your Produce… by Julie Moreno

Our peppers are in full swing. Right now, we have Bell Peppers, Lunch Box Peppers and Jimmy Nardellos. All of these are sweet peppers and not spicy. The bells are the classic grocery store pepper. They are good eaten raw in salad or cooked, stuffed with your favorite filling. The Lunch Box peppers are the ones that look similar to a jalapeno, about 3 inches long, but are yellow and red. These peppers make a perfect snack and have few seeds, so you can just sink your teeth in and take a bite. The Jimmy Nardello peppers are an heirloom variety, brought by the Nardello family from southern Italy in the late 1800’s. They cultivated the peppers year after year here in the United States and their fourth child, Jimmy, donated some of the seeds to Seed Savers Exchange. I included a recipe today featuring these peppers.

Sautéed Peppers

6-7 whole Lunch Box and/or

Jimmy Nardellos

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 clove garlic, minced

Salt and pepper, to taste

*  Set a skillet or sauté pan over medium heat. When the pan is hot, add the olive oil and peppers. Turn the peppers every minute or so until they blister on each side about 4-5 minutes. Turn the heat off and add the garlic to the hot pan. Stir for about 30 seconds, until fragrant then add the salt and

Pepper.  Scoop out and remove seeds; Enjoy!

Peaches & Dreams

Peaches are coming ripe, reminding me of childhood summers and simpler days: recalling mom and grandma slicing peaches and debating the better canning peach, freestone or cling; following in my father’s footsteps by delivering The Stockton Record, an afternoon daily, except weekends; walking a 70 house suburban route in fierce weekday heat; tossing folded and banded papers from sidewalk to porch stoop, except Wednesdays and Sundays when ad inserts made the missiles heavy and aerodynamic as a brick; walking up paved drives or across green lawns to heave those bricks underhanded toward the door stoop; breaking one window in four and a half years of slinging 81,900 missiles and heaving 32,700 bricks; cringing at errant throws pruning ill-placed porch plants; returning home, bags empty but face full red; slipping off shoes and T-shirt before diving into the Doughboy’s cooling water; pulling a ripe peach off the backyard tree and rubbing fuzz onto a damp denim pocket of faded 501 cut-offs; biting into the sweet, satisfying fruit; wondering if I would be more freestone or cling.

Summer Vinaigrette…

I recently found this recipe that featured a whole tomato blended into a vinaigrette dressing. Adding sweetness and acidity, the tomato flavors the dressing and adds texture and body to the dressing. Blended with basil and garlic, use this dressing over grilled squash or as a dip for carrots and of course salad.

Tomato Vinaigrette

1 medium heirloom tomato      

¼ cup red wine vinegar or        

white balsamic vinegar              

1 garlic clove                                 

6-8 basil leaves

1 teaspoon honey 

¾ cup olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

* Blend on high speed until smooth and creamy

Metaphors of Soil and Soul…

Cheeky Peppers

Ronda May Melendez & Keith F Martin

While picking the garden peppers, I learned something about the plants I had not known. Pepper plants – especially the fiery, mouth-searing varieties – can be quite sensitive and stubborn; they can certainly dish out the heat but can’t take it. As I pulled at the peppers, some resisted coming off the plant cleanly, despite their being fully ripe and ready to serve. The intractable peppers snapped themselves in two or snapped the branch that had nurtured their growth. Such cheeky behavior got me thinking.

Do ripe peppers feel separation anxiety? Probably not, but it didn’t seem right, even seemed impudent, for these fiery plants to stubbornly withhold their ripe fruit. Just the same, I found a work around for their resistance. I held the pepper stem firmly closest to its branch, pulled lightly with a gentle twist, and off came the pepper undamaged. Win, win, win! The fruit came off cleanly, the branch remained intact, and I held a ripe pepper ready to flavor my evening salsa fresca.

Humans, though, do experience separation anxiety, and like peppers, we also succumb to “cheeky pepper syndrome.” At harvest time when we are ripe and ready to serve, we refuse to release our fruit freely and fully, withholding gifts and talents from the hand of the harvester. We feel fearful, or even possessive, when asked to offer up our precious fruit. This may reveal our doubt that we are ripe or, perhaps, our unbelief that we are ready to serve. Ambivalent, we defiantly cling to our delightful fruit, damaging it or ourselves during harvest. 

The LORD planted us to bear abundant fruit, His original design at creation, and He harvests it for His pleasure and good purposes. Be assured of this: You may confidently yield your ripe fruit into His firm hands. Just as I bore up the plant to maintain the integrity of both the peppers and the branches during harvest, The LORD will gently handle us so that our ripe fruit goes forth intact and our branches remain productive.

“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser…

you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him,

he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.”

John 15:1,5