On our road trip down to LA for Christmas this year, we stopped in Fresno to visit my best friend Yue and the new house that she shares with her husband Adam. Every trip to the Central Valley is always so eye-opening, and I get so much joy learning about horticulture and seeing it come alive before my very eyes with every garden, tree, and flower. It’s truly a labor of love and I admire how self-sustaining their lives have become.

The Orchard

As children of Chinese immigrant parents raised to love fruit more than just about anything in the world, we loved exploring their small but growing orchard. The wintertime harvest is modest, but citruses are aplenty. We woke up at the crack of dawn to pick oranges, lemons, and grapefruits covered in a layer of frost. Shirley tried her first raw olive, and it’s pretty obvious how that turned out.

The Coop

We wandered to another section of their 20-acre property to the sound of squawking and gobbling. The coop was home to two dozen or so hens, roosters, and a pair of turkeys (we named them Tom and Tammy!) The coop was full of fresh farm eggs and Adam demonstrated the freakish stabilization power of a chicken head (hello new gimbal?) We watched Tom Turkey open his feathers for the first time and let out a mating call. Animal Planet, up close and personal.

The Local Nursery

Yue took us to her favorite nursery, located conveniently a mile up the road. Even in the dead of winter they carry an impressive variety of trees and plants of all sizes. The coolest corner was the owners’ personal vegetable garden, full of luscious vibrant winter produce: broccoli, cauliflower, snap peas, flowering cabbage, kale, chard, herbs in a bathtub, and a friendly tuxedo cat.

I love visiting rural places. It’s truly a break from urban life and I feel so grounded in the earth, the changing seasons, and a slower pace of life that rewards you with much-needed peace and calm.

Hope you enjoy these photojournalistic glimpses of life in Fresno. Winter is its own serene type of beauty, when a late sunrise slowly illuminates the sky in a quiet, unostentatious way.