Luscious local strawberries are here.
B.C.’s annual home-grown strawberry harvest is the best, brightest sign that summer in the Lower Mainland has finally arrived.
Deep, ruby red and bursting with an intense flavour, B.C.’s melt-in-your-mouth strawberry varieties are allowed to ripen on the vine so they ripen from the inside out – unlike the pulpy, tasteless Californian imports lining supermarket shelves all year.
The extra growing time gives them the superb fruit flavour and consistency they’re famous for (but makes it impossible to ship them very far). B.C. strawberry varieties are not everbearing, meaning there’s just one crop a year.
The short season – typically just three to four weeks from mid June to mid-July – means you’ve got to act fast.
The berries are hand-picked in the fields daily and immediately sold in flats that fly off the shelves of local fruit stands.
Early one recent weekday morning, Surrey Farm’s fruit stand on 152nd and Colebrook Rd. was already bustling with customers eagerly carrying sticky, fruit-laden flats of fresh strawberries to the till.
Surrey Farms sells as many as 10,000 pounds of fresh strawberries a day during the brief, frantic season, making them the family-owned operation’s number-one berry crop in terms of sales.
“When people see local strawberries for sale, they go crazy,” Surrey Farm’s fruit stand manager Baljinder said. “Some people say they’re in heaven.”
Customers love the berries, but they’re a headache for the grower. They’re costly to harvest and it’s nearly impossible to find enough pickers.
Even more troubling, the berries don’t fetch a good price in return at fruit co-ops in a market dominated by cheap imports.
If it weren’t for overwhelming customer demand, it would be tempting to get out of the strawberry business, the steadily dwindling number of local growers admit.
