The Sweet Life

This summer, grab a bucket and make tracks to the closest U-pick to take home the delight of local berries

Story by Noémi LoPinto

If you’ve ever stared in despair at the empty fruit bowl in the middle of your kitchen table, this is the season to fill it to the brim. Summer is here, and that means fresh fruit and fresh air are readily available at your nearest U-pick fruit farm. All you need is two hands, a tank of gas and $20.

Case in point: a mere six kilometres west of Edmonton is Roy’s Raspberries, where you can meander over 20 acres (eight hectares) and fill an ice cream pail with 13 different kinds of raspberries. Owners Lorraine and Harvey Boyko will gladly share more than 200 recipes for muffins, pies and jams.

“Customers like to make a day of it,” says Lorraine. “It’s nice to see people coming back out to the country, and kids walking around with raspberries on the ends of their fingers.”

Few urbanites today grow their own fruit and vegetables. Some of us can’t tell a raspberry from a blueberry unless it’s wrapped in cellophane and brightly labelled. It doesn’t help that many people grew up thinking you couldn’t grow fruit here. But in the late 1970s, new developments in fruit cultivars suddenly made it commercially viable to plant berries able to survive Alberta’s cold winters.

Many farmers added fruit to their operations just to see what would happen. They discovered that tourists loved to come to the farm to pick their own dessert. In the 1980s, city slickers joined the ranks as they realized that the taste of a raspberry that has travelled thousands of kilometres in a truck from California can’t compare to one grown locally.

In the last decade, many U-pick operators have added entertainment: they conduct field tours, set up picnic tables and playgrounds and open small restaurants, gift and novelty shops. For the Boykos, who have been farming the same land since the 1970s, running a U-pick is now a way of life.

“Each and every one of my customers is special, and for the most part they’re in a great mood,” says Lorraine. “Everyone is really chatty. Tourists come in who’ve never seen a raspberry bush before in their lives. I have to take them out and show them that the fruit won’t pick itself.”

People are becoming more aware of the tremendous health benefits of eating locally grown, fresh fruit. Raspberries, like the Boyne variety, have three times the antioxidants of kiwis and 10 times that of tomatoes. (Antioxidants help prevent damage to cell membranes and other structures in the body by neutralizing free radicals.)

The fruit also has antimicrobial properties, which can help prevent the overgrowth of certain bacteria and fungi in the body, such as Candida albicans, a contributor to vaginal infections and irritable bowel syndrome. Some research suggests that berries may inhibit cancer cell and tumour formation. It makes you wonder why we drink so much imported orange juice.

It’s because of forgotten folk wisdom, says Dr. Ken Fry, an entomologist and instructor at Olds College. For example, black currants have very high levels of antioxidants and between three and five times the amount of vitamin C found in citrus fruits. “I don’t know why North Americans have lost their taste for them,” says Fry. “People in Europe drink black currant juice like crazy.”

Fry has seen a tremendous variety of fruits thrive in Alberta: chokecherries, sour cherries, Mongolian cherries, sea buckthorn, honey berries, high bush cranberry, apples and even plums. He says fruit growers in this province are on the leading edge. “People don’t know that you can grow all kinds of fruit on the prairies,” he says. “You can even grow wine grapes here.”

The growing season in Alberta is short but productive. Soils are generally pH-balanced between six and eight, a neutral environment that most plants love. Long days of bright sunlight and a generally dry climate mean less mould and disease, and the bitter winters keep the insects at bay.

This doesn’t mean U-pick operators live worry-free lives. An overly moist spring and rainy summer can contribute to the growth of fungus. Strong prairie winds can blow spores in from the mountains that reduce the reproductive capacity of the plant, or deprive it of nutrients. Left unchallenged, grey mould or powdery mildew can ruin an entire crop. And then there’s the bugs.

Sustainable practices, integrated pest and crop management and good landscaping choices are the best defence, says Barb Van Ee of the Garden of Van Ee-den Farms, located 20 minutes northwest of Brooks. Van Ee and her husband have three acres of Seascape and Tri-star strawberries, a fruit she says is about the size of a small apple. “They are fabulous strawberries with a lovely fragrance and a great flavour,” she says.

Although her husband had always made his living farming, the U-pick project is Barb’s baby. She weeds and hoes all three acres by hand, staying true to her decision to stay away from chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and fungicides.

Other than a sign at the post office in the nearby town of Rosemary, she left advertising up to word of mouth. Luckily, customer response was tremendous. In her first year, she tripled the production she’d expected.

Seascape and Tri-star are varieties of what are called day-neutral strawberries. Unlike June-bearing and ever-bearing strawberries, they flower during long days and hot weather. They produce fruit the same year they’re planted and are highly disease-resistant.

The Van Ees planted the strawberries by hand last spring, watered, weeded and cultivated, checked for bugs in the fall, covered them with a foot of straw for insulation against Chinook weather in late April and uncovered them again in the spring. They have integrated beneficial insects into their crop to counteract pests. Van Ee has also encouraged the presence of insect-eating robins and orioles. But birds like berries, too. “What you lose in strawberries you gain in pest management,” she says. “We don’t mind sharing a little bit.”

Strawberries are a rich source of phenols and are a natural anti-inflammatory. And they are undeniably beautiful, says Van Ee. “People come back saying “there’s so many left, but I already have five baskets!’” says Van Ee. “One lady came and picked eight, four-litre baskets before she had to stop.”

Van Ee has big plans for this year: a farm store and gift shop where she can serve beverages and display locally made crafts and products. The store stands right in the berry patch. It looks like a little log cabin with a front porch. The couple’s four grandkids are looking forward to giving customers instructions on how to pick the fruit: get down on your knees and pick each berry individually until you can’t pick any more.

One of the best parts of a U-pick is the social aspect. Kids run around in the fresh air and sunlight with their mouths and hands stained red and blue; farmers exchange ideas and swap stories; urbanites get a taste of rural life; farm families open a window on the world.

And compared to starting a grain or cattle operation, the costs of starting a fruit orchard are relatively low. You don’t need a $100,000 combine. You need to like people and have what Lloyd Hausher, fruit industry development specialist with Alberta Agriculture and Food, calls “sweat equity.”

“Location is also a factor,” says Hausher. “You need to be near a high population area to get the customers. And the crop makes a difference.”

Over the years, Hausher has participated in scientific trials in developing fruit to grow in Alberta. Most of the varieties of strawberries grown here come from Nova Scotia or the northeastern U.S, while most saskatoon varieties grown at U-picks come from their “selections of selections of selections,” say Hausher. Smoky was one of the first two cultivars officially named and released in Canada, over 50 years ago.

Brock Friesen says the descendants of pioneers love the Smoky. The 29-year-old operator of Dunvegan Gardens, the Edmonton counterpart of his father’s Peace River-based operation of the same name, has seven acres of saskatoons, strawberries, raspberries, and black currants southwest of the city. “Black currants are most popular with eastern Europeans,” he says. “Strawberries attract people from western countries, and saskatoons are very popular with Prairie folks."

Marvin Gill, owner of Bumble Berry Orchards, grows saskatoons, raspberries, strawberries, wild black cherry and chokecherry on 50 acres south of Strathmore. Gill also avoids chemicals, in part because his new business, fruit wines, would suffer if he didn’t. His two-year-old company, Field Stone Fruit Wines, is one of only two fruit wineries in the province.

The best part is the antioxidants in the fruit are not lost in fermentation process, says Gill. “The saskatoons are one of the highest, with lots of goodness in them. All of these berries are native to the prairies, so growth is not a problem.” With a U-pick and a winery, Gill has the best of both worlds: steady business in wines in the winter, and people from all over the world coming to pick fruit in the summer.

Many U-pick operators will branch out in some way: some make jams and pies, others sell fruit to local restaurants and others sell crushed fruit as pie filling to local bakeries. Some would call that diversification, or value-added marketing. Leona Staples, co-owner of The Jungle Farm near Innisfail, calls it “non-traditional agriculture.”

In addition to more than 18 acres (seven hectares) of strawberries and raspberries, the Staples grow hay, grain, flowers and vegetables and have 30 head of cattle. Through a combination of initiatives, such as attending farmers’ markets and donating berries to festivals, they advertise through word of mouth, which Staples says is key to staying profitable.

But word of mouth has to start somewhere. “At the farmers’ market someone will walk by who’s never tasted a truly fresh strawberry,” Staples says. “And they’ll say 'Wow, I want to buy more of that.’ Then I can say “here’s a brochure.’”

Like all forms of agriculture, running a fruit farm is hard work. There is weeding, hoeing, fertilizing, trimming, cleaning, watering and pruning to be done. From spring until fall, fruit growers can put in as much as 16 hours a day. But Leona likes being able to set her own prices and deal directly with customers. The risks are the same as other forms of agriculture - a hailstorm is as hard on a field of strawberries as it is on barley - but she takes pride in bridging the gap between urban and rural life. One of about 150 U-pick operators in the province, Staples is convinced a cultural shift is taking place, where people are willing to make the trip out to the country, not only for the fruit, but also for the experience.

“It hasn’t totally happened everywhere,” she says. “Luckily, farmers are eternally optimistic.”

Berry healthy

Not only do berries taste great, but a single cup delivers a day’s worth of all the antioxidants your body needs. Studies show raspberries, blueberries, strawberries and blackberries are chock full of these important disease-fighting compounds. Antioxidants help prevent and repair damage caused to cells caused by oxidation, a natural process that occurs during normal cell function where a small percentage of cells become damaged and turn into free radicals, which have been linked to cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. When compared with more than 100 foods, including vegetables and spices, berries won hands-down in pro-viding the most antioxidant bang for your buck.

A cup of fresh strawberries provides about 88 milligrams of ascorbic acid, which exceeds the recommended daily dietary minimum of 45 milligrams for the average adult.

A half a cup of saskatoons will supply almost a quarter of your daily-recommended supply of iron. A three-year University of British Columbia study of the Smokey and Thiessen varieties found that the antioxidant activity of the saskatoon was comparable to the blueberry, supposedly the crown jewel of antioxidant activity.

The chokecherry, or wild black cherry, is a good source of potassium and is high in fibre, protein and fat.