Cherries, Strawberries, Peaches, Apricots and Turnip

Cherries! Before living in Cawston, I would not have been able to identify what a cherry tree looked like. Though we are not officially growing cherries at Klippers this year, we do have a few cherry trees on the property which the other apprentices and I are eagerly waiting to harvest. Though we have been warned that we should be prepared to consume our cherries with added protein if you will - the reason that Klippers did not continue their cherry block lease this year is because cherries in BC are being heavily hit by a fruit fly that spreads its eggs into the fruit. The problem bad that in the industrial agricultural sector, if I understand this correctly, a new bylaw has been passed that allows farmers to spray the cherries with a protective pesticide up to 3 days prior to harvest. Previously, the spray was only allowed to be dispersed up to 7 days prior to harvest. This same bug caused cherries to go extinct in Japan.

Still knowing what I do, the cherry trees are beautiful. The red and yellow of the fruit is in beautiful contrast to our clear blue skies and the rich green leaves under which they are growing. Plus, the other apprentices and I have come up with a great solution - chocolate covered bug filled cherries. If chocolate covered cherries and chocoloate covered insects are both good, we might as well just combine them all at once!

The strawberries have also started to ripen. These little delicious burst of flavour have always been very exciting to me. Living in Vancouver, I used to do day trips to Surrey to go to the u-picks at the end of the strawberry season to take advantage of the fact that the price was $1.00/lb. I have learned I can pick a lot of strawberries. We have been happy to send strawberries to market this week and also put them in our large CSA shares.

I am glad to report on the growth of some of our tree fruit as well. Though we are still busy thinning apples, which we will hopefully finish this week, the peaches and apricots have been left to grow under the warm sun. Above you can see the fuzzy peaches about the size of golf balls now, and below the apricots of similar size. I am unsure when both will be ready to harvest, but am definitely looking forward to it. Hopefully not too long now for the apricots.

Last, I was asked to harvest turnip this week for market. Glad to have a new vegetable to pull out of the ground, I started the endeavour of pulling these roots and getting them ready to bunch. However, much to my dismay, every turnip I pulled up had been eaten by worms! Now there is currently a discussion going on about weather the worms are wire worm or root maggot and I hope to get clarification this week. If the little pest is one of these two, he will only eat turnip, however if he is the other and we pull out all the turnip, he will migrate to carrots or beets which we obviously want to avoid.

Regardless, as you can see the turnip we have pulled are being consumed and the tiny worms just cut out. When I was assigned the task of cultivating the turnip, I honestly had to stop and ask if we really couldn't sell any of them - I figured that people have to realize that organic means that there are pests, so maybe consumers ok if there is only one worm? At the Penticton farmers' market this weekend, other farmers had gone about cutting out the worms and bagging the turnips together to sell. It seems turnip is just not meant to be grown in Cawston (sorry Mum).