Often times picking produce is really a simple matter of common sense. If you choose a bunch of broccoli you can generally follow your aesthetic sense and make a good choice. Same goes for green beans.

Things can get more tricky when it come to choosing melons, and it is down right counter-intuitive when it comes to picking stone fruits.

To complicate things further in the stone fruit category, the farmer I buy most of my summer fruit from has 173 varieties of stone fruit! And as if it is not hard enough to pick between peaches, nectarines, plums, and apricots he also has many of the “cross breeds” and of the cross breeds there are of course sub-categories of named varieties.

So that means fruit with crazy names like pluot, plucot and apriums are just broad categories for fruit with names like Flavorella and Flavorosa!

Many of these sub-sub-categories are also only available one or two weeks a year! So once you find one you like the next time the Farmers Market rolls around the choices have changed.