Well, I'm a bit behind my goal of posting every day, but I'm still hoping to make the more-reasonable, 3-posts-per-week schedule. Because I didn't post for my first few weeks at the farm, I have to revisit some things that we've stopped doing, before I forget them. I began my time at Mighty Food picking
strawberries, for the most part. This activity took entire mornings (that's four and a half hours, by the way) during the peak of the season, and this was a
bad year!
It was the plants' third year, so you can't blame them too much for their diminished yields this season. We keep strawberries around for three years at Mighty Food, precisely because the plants produce fewer berries in their third season. If we kept our oldest succession for next year, it would yield fewer berries and have a shorter season. As it was, about half of our strawberry plants died or produced no berries at all this season, so it's a good thing we have a brand new succession planted and getting ready for June of 2011!
That's right, we have our new succession in the ground already. That seemed pretty strange to me when I started. I wondered why we would plant them in spring, harvest no berries from them, and leave them out over the winter. However, most of the strawberry varieties we use peak in their second year, so we give them their first year to grow big and strong so they'll be able to stand up to the frost and snow in winter. Of course, they still try to produce berries this year, but we stop them in their tracks.
They also try to grow
runners (the red things in this photo) and flowers. Runners are stems that plants use to create genetic clones of themselves. Once a runner plants itself in (or on) soil, a new plant will sprout and begin to grow. You can cut these off and plant them on their own, creating an independent, but identical plant, or allow the plant to grow with its clones. We do neither. Instead, we cut them off as soon as we can during the first year. The same goes for flowers and developing fruit. We've spent a few hours in the new strawberries on multiple occasions, removing flowers, berries, and runners along with the weeds that grow in the plant beds.
You see, plants are miraculous forms of life that will not only survive being cut to pieces or torn apart, but will continue to grow from there. Most plants grow at an astounding rate (the zucchinis in my garden are gaining leaves by the day), and consume an incredible amount of energy doing so. When we cut off all of the strawberries' attempts to reproduce and fruit, they have nowhere to put all of this energy except into growth of the leaves and roots that already exist. Of course, a little of the energy goes into creating more runners and flowers, but as long as we keep them pruned, the plants themselves will soak up most the energy, ensuring that they are big and strong enough to survive the cold Vermont winter.
While the strawberry plants will endure the cold and bear many fruits next year, some of the berries themselves will not make it. Before the berries are even fully formed, the
Tarnished Plant Bug will wreak havoc upon them. This serious pest, known to farmers and gardeners by the foreboding name "TPB," feeds on the
achenes* and the flesh underneath them before the berries develop. The places it eats no longer receive growth hormone and logically stop growing, resulting in puckered flesh with clusters of achenes (photo, right). We call those "cat-faced berries." To me, they don't taste much different - they're a little more sour, if anything - but we can't sell them because of their appearance and taste, so we get to eat them when we find them.
While the TPB strikes fear into the heart of many a strawberry grower, the common
slug is arguably the most hated garden pest in this country. It, and its shelled cousin, the snail, are very difficult to combat; even some very potent pesticides do nothing to inhibit it. My cousin recently told me that he lined his garden with Black Diamond, a glass powder, to prevent slugs from getting in. Instead of eviscerating themselves like he expected, the slugs very happily slimed their ways over the glass and ate his plants anyway. There is really nothing we can do at Mighty Food to stop this mollusc menace, so we inevitably find quite a few berries that look like this:
What's worse that finding a worm in your apple?
Of course, we can't sell berries like this in good conscience. Unfortunately, many an unscrupulous farmer will look the other way and sell them anyway (I got a quart of berries for jam from a farm in Springfield, VT the other day that had quite a few slug-eaten berries in it. Don't buy berries from a guy set up on the side of the road.) The very worst part about it is that slugs always pick the very best berries! It's like they know which ones look and taste the best to humans. It never fails; you reach under a plant and find a cluster of berries that looks pretty good. None of them are moldy, they're all dark red, and you're getting pretty excited, because your boss wants 100 pints by lunchtime. When you turn the best-looking berry around to examine it, nothing appears to be amiss, so you pull it off and bring it to your face to study it more closely. Suddenly, your gut sinks to the ground because there are a few telltale holes near the stem; a slug has been snacking on your crop! So, you throw it into the row and smoosh it with your knees on your way to unpicked plants. At least it can beautify your junky, old jeans!
Besides creepy, crawly things, strawberries fall victim to many other damaging organisms. Mice are one (although some readers may classify them as creepy-crawly.), and we have standing orders to kill any rodent on sight. Another is mold. The longer a strawberry stays on its plant, the more likely it is to develop a mold, because it has more time to catch airborne mold spores. Unfortunately, once one strawberry gets mold, those spores are pretty common around the berries. The mold (and rot, which is caused by bacteria) spread to any berries that are touching the bad berry, so the best thing you can do is keep them cleaned out, so to speak. During a bad week, we spent many hours in the strawberry beds just picking moldy or rotten berries and throwing them very far away from the plants. Because we did this, the next week, the strawberries had a resurgence of healthy, good berries before they stopped producing fruit for the season. We probably lost $500 of berries to the mold, but we would have lost more had we just let them go.
Living berries are not the only ones that can get mold! If you buy fresh berries from a farm stand (or, if you're feeling masochistic, a package from the store) they will go bad pretty quickly even in a cooler. At some point, we've all opened the Frigidaire door and been assaulted by the full-bodied stank of bad strawberries.
You can prolong your strawberries' 'fresh' period by leaving the stems on! I don't know
why this is, but it's absolutely true.
So, if you've made it this far, you must love strawberries as much as I do! You may have never knelt in the straw and picked through the thistles to find good berries, but you should know by now what to avoid should you ever find yourself in a strawberry field. Come to think of it, next year, around June, head out to a local farm with a 'pick your own' section and get your hands under the plants! Nothing will teach you about berries faster than that!
Get Jamming!
The Regular Farmer
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*Did you know what we think of as 'seeds' on a strawberry are actually the fruit? Achenes are a type of dry fruit that develop on many flowering plants. A single seed is contained within each achene. The red stuff that we think of as the 'fruit' on a strawberry is excess flesh that has evolved to be tasty so rodents and other creatures will eat and spread the actual fruit and the seeds within.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRuNxHqwazs
