Joe Quattrochi, of Quattrochi’s Fine Foods in Kingston, knows the strawberry game and knows what farmers are up against.

A berry for all seasons

Strawberry season used to be short but new methods create bigger berries year-round. Still, nothing is better than the ripening seasonal jewel

Charles Summers
Farmers Forum

By the time you’ll be reading this, strawberry season in Ontario will have largely come and gone. What “strawberry season” means has begun to change… I don’t know if you noticed, but Ontario strawberries were already appearing in stores well ahead of normal, and at a staggeringly low price. If this seems new to you (it is), let me explain:

Universal fresh berries are one of the great triumphs of modernity. Today, normal folks can buy blueberries, raspberries, blackberries and strawberries (“small fruit”) at pretty much every grocery store in Canada, 52 weeks a year – they come from everywhere in the Americas. Packers like Driscoll’s contract growers from British Columbia to Mexico to Chile to keep the little fruits on the shelf year-round. Keeping them fresh on this journey requires not only incredible logistics, but also a great deal of medicine: those out-of-season berries are drenched, I can assure you.

But even with these channels in place, Ontario strawberries grown out-of-season is something new. Leamington, Ontario is home to the biggest complex of greenhouses in Canada. Over the past few years, they’ve perfected growing hydroponic strawberries almost year-round in the controlled environment of their hothouses, and it’s been a big success. For the most part, these are the Ontario strawberries you see in both large and small grocers.

The greenhouse industry in Leamington exists largely because of three factors:

1) the low Canadian dollar;

2) proximity to the American border;

3) a local culture of skilled growers ‒ primarily Italians (the Romans just keep on winning) – savvy people, with geographic proximity, leveraging financial mechanisms.

It’s weird to ponder that a lot of fresh veg in the U.S. Midwest is grown under glass in Southwestern Ontario, but that’s the fact of the matter for more than just strawberries. This goes for customary greenhouse crops like peppers and tomatoes, but also Ontario field crops like carrots and onions (U.S. growers resent the competition.)

Strawberries, as traditionally grown in our region, are “June bearing” types. They flower in May, fruit in June/July, go dormant for a month, and then send runners out sideways to propagate themselves, and repeat again next season. The varieties (mainly just one variety, Albion) being grown in the Leamington tunnels are not June bearers, but rather, an “everbearing” type. They squirt out a smaller version of the early summer crop as the June plant, and then repeat it slowly, over several months in late summer and fall. If you plant them over and over again in a controlled environment, you can essentially get infinite strawberries.

Joe Quattrochi, of Quattrochi’s Fine Foods in Kingston, is a great friend of mine. He’s been in our corner for a decade now, and is our source for seed potatoes and packing materials. He loves to call me “young man” even though I am no longer young, and I’m always eager for him to bend my ear about the nitty gritty of the produce business. I walked in through the backdoor to order some stuff – Joe tells me that if I want to be taken seriously as a professional, I should always enter a business through the backdoor, not the retail side – and he asked me to come into his office.

“Charlie, you need to understand this about the strawberry game. They’re producing them cheap now in Leamington. They’re going to screw the whole season up for Ontario field growers. Look at this…” He slides me a copy of The Grower, headline “A New Way to Grow Strawberries,” and leads me out of the office and takes me to the cooler.

He has pallets of strawberries (in April). “These are all coming out of the greenhouses. They’re basically giving them away. They’re good berries. But do you see how small they are?” He gives me a few quarts to take home for the kids, being the gentleman he is.

And he’s right, they’re on the small side.

“The big fruit is all going to the states. The big number one berries get primo prices and it’s cheaper to get them to Michigan than this side of Toronto. This is where they make their money… the later picks, with the small berries, they’re junk to them.

They’re selling them at salvage, I’m paying a little over $1/quart for these. This is what you’re up against.”

A good sign of a real friend is how frank they will be with you, and while Joe is warning me about a market trend, and I’m here to pass that along, I want to address a larger issue. As Joe articulated, this advancement is going to fundamentally alter how consumers view the idea of “strawberry season” in Ontario, and although strawberries are of economic importance to us here on our own farm, this matter of “seasons” is more important to me than any one crop. As living breathing humans, we need seasons.

Seasons are a very fundamental aspect of life. We see it as we age. We start off a helpless blob, and then after a year or so, we stand on our own two feet and enter a world of wonder. Life catches up with us fast once the hormones start flowing and we find ourselves a confused, gawky teenager. Lord willing, we mature into an adult, and falling in love, developing a vocation and starting a family begins to show us all of the depth, joy and hardship that our time under the sun hands us. As time goes on, we’re able to help others, witness great triumphs and tragedies, and eventually start going to funerals a few times a month, until we look down on our own.

“Strawberries have been good to us,” says Robert Miller. Robert and Shannon Miller switched from dairy farming to grow berries near Smiths Falls. (Charles Summers photo)

Life is about constant change and renewal, and the world around us plainly demonstrates that for those of us with eyes to see. The trees were naked a month or so ago. Now our world thumps with green. Soon enough it will be gold and scarlet, and just like every year, grey once again. Change and variety is what defines real “life.”

My friends Robert and Shannon Miller grow berries in Rideau Ferry, smack dab between Perth and Smith Falls. Exiting the dairy industry, they turned to berries as the next step in their farming journey. “Strawberries have been good to us” Robert concedes. “I’m glad they’re seasonal!” Shannon chuckles. They produce 13 acres of the finicky, labour intensive crop and market almost all of it on the side of the road to loyal customers they’ve built up over 16 years in business. While dabbling in everbearing varietals with success, the real peak of their season is when the public joins them on their farm for their extensive u-pick operation. While no longer making up the lion’s share of gross receipts, “People come to the farm now not to make a year’s worth of jam, but more as an outing with the kids,” Shannon explains. And so, what they accomplish more than anything is to give the broader community the opportunity to experience a bit of the magic of farming. Robert and Shannon have a business based on people going out of their way to work with their farm, and they’ve earned it.

This notion of having everything all of the time really runs counter to the iron laws of physical reality. It makes us spoiled and soft, and alienates us from nature while distorting our tastes and expectations. It’s profitable and convenient, but we don’t really appreciate something unless we do without it for a spell. And the other aspect of this is that the industrial “everything all the time” model is incapable of producing something objectively as wonderful as “God is smiling on us for a moment” – the Albions are good, but they’re not great. The Leamington berries beat the crap out of the styrofoam coming out of Oxnard, California, but they’re just not as tender or luscious as a real strawberry.

Now, don’t get me wrong: as a businessman and horticulturists I am going to try to have strawberries as many days a year as possible. This involves growing a handful of varieties with a handful of different methods. Famously, Quebecois growers on the Isle d’Orleans have figured out how to do this for almost six months of the year. If I can grow them and people want to buy them, why wouldn’t we? But there will never be a replacement for a warm jewel, ripened under the sun at the zenith of the season.

Charles Summers owns Salt of the Earth Farm, a direct-to-consumer operation selling vegetables at the roadside, near Lyndhurst, Ontario.