More early stuff

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? Sorry. The past month or so has been busy and work and home, and the blog has suffered. But continuing in the vein of earliness I discussed in the May 19 blog, both local strawberries and corn were early (again, I should add) this year. There are technical reasons for this seeming earliness, because when I was a kid (back in the Dark Ages of the 1940's and 1950's), strawberries were never ready until June 1 or a day or two on either side of it, then lasted until about July 4, and local sweet corn was rare before late July.

Many strawberry growers these days (at least in Ohio) are using a technique called roto-cropping for an earlier yield on their fields. This involves a roughly six-month rotation between strawberries and some other crop, like melons or squash. At the end of the summer season, the late products are plowed under and strawberries planted in their place. In the spring, the strawberries leap from the ground and produce a prodigious first-year crop, almost out of control in quantity and size -- big in both respects. They're pretty tasty, too, although it's arguable whether they're better than the strawberries produce over the four- or five-year time span of traditional growing methods.

Many believe bigger berries aren't as sweet as the smaller berries of the past, but that may just be nostalgia. Certainly, I think the berries grown using roto-cropping are plenty tasty, but I have to say I did my usual freezer jam production a few weeks ago at the peak of the season and it was an utter failure. Anyone have any use for pint upon pint of strawberry syrup? No, me either.

Whether this failure was my fault or something about the berries I can't say, but the same thing happened last year to a lesser degree even though I followed directions to the letter both times. Maybe it was me. Oh, well.

Anyway, once the berries are finished (simply exhausted or beaten up by rain once too many times), the vines are plowed under and a second crop planted.

Sweet corn is a little different story. Corn is one of those crops that can be largely customized by hybridizing, and numerous early varieties have been developed in the last ten years (roughly), pushing the appearance of fresh sweet corn forward by a month or so. Now, this corn is mostly (and maybe exclusively, since all I've seen has been) available in the so-called peaches and cream bi-color format. I think it's a little bland compared to the later bi-color varieties and some -- not all -- of the late summer white and yellow sweets, but it still beats the alternative of corn shipped in from 500 to a thousand miles away.

Summer's here, finally, and we'll have good sweet corn until the end of September or, luck holding, into October. Not to mention the raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and other local yummies starting to show up now. Personally, I'm looking forward to the tomatoes in my back yard, which are setting tons of fruit and should start showing some ripeness by mid-July. Yumm.