BUZZon - California Berries

Strawberries by JoDee Samuelson With our gardens put to bed for the winter, we turn to grocery store shelves for fresh fruit and vegetables. Where do those beautifully packaged strawberries come from?

California.

Your trusty correspondent had the good fortune to be in California recently, in Watsonville, south of Santa Cruz. This city is a tiny dot on the map, yet (unlike the dots on a PEI map) it is home to 50,000 residents. Every day before dawn, a stream of vehicles creeps through the town, bearing farm workers on their way to the strawberry fields of Watsonville. By the time the sun comes up, pickers are already filling baskets with fruit that will, within the week, be on PEI kitchen tables.

The strawberry fields are flat, twice the size of the Charlottetown racetrack or larger. Berries are grown in hilled double rows through holes punched in plastic, with an irrigation hose running along each row. Are they as good as Island strawberries? No! Even berries from an organic U-Pick were hard and tough-stemmed, perfect for shipping across the country but not for snackin’ on while you pick, as we do here.

Every two years, the fields (of non-organic farms) are plowed down, fumigated and covered with an immense sheet of plastic. When every living thing is good and dead, the plastic gets bundled up and shipped to Asia to be recycled, and the berry planting-and-growing routine resumes. All that plastic seems a little grim—not to mention the chemicals used to fumigate—but those farmers give us what we want: beautiful fruit year-round.

Watsonville enjoys a pleasant coastal climate, good for apple orchards, acres of greenhouses bursting with raspberries and blackberries, and lettuce in impeccable rows stretching to the horizon. Over the hills to the east is the San Joaquim Valley (the flattest land surface on earth) with mile after mile of pistachio trees, walnuts, almonds and pecans; raisin grapes: red potatoes; roma tomatoes; peppers; garlic; corn corn corn; cotton; peaches, plums. The heat is intense. Holstein cows stand listlessly under what shade they can find, munching on corn silage and dreaming of moving to PEI. In the dairy farmer’s yard a palm tree reaches to the heavens, with a fig or orange tree complementing the landscape.

California is truly a different world. With the right combination of irrigation, huge machinery and cheap labour they can grow everything. It’s impossible to tell who the illegal immigrants are, but it’s a sure thing that they’re happy to have jobs.

Back on the Island we find things comfortingly the same as when we left. Out for a nighttime walk, we admire the moonlight reflecting off the treetops, and off the plastic-wrapped rows of silage in the farmer’s field, reminding us that, like California, we have our own plastic waste issues. We’re connected in many ways, not the least of which is our fondness for the humble strawberry.

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by JoDee Samuelson