Strawberries: Ode to a Fruit
First garden strawberry of 2022 was a beauty!
Is there anything more perfect than an early strawberry, shiny and red, fragrant and sweet? We don’t think so (although we reserve the right to say that about all the foods we love!). A tiny June strawberry, fresh from a field or a farmers’ market, delights all of the senses - smell, taste, sight, touch, and… ok, maybe not hearing. Strawberries belong to the genus Fragaria, and the etymology here is no mystery: the fragrance of strawberries is the stuff of poetry. In the poem Wild Strawberries, Robert Graves describes the “...confounding of taste and scent.” And indeed, the science is in - a strawberry’s taste and scent are inextricably intertwined; the aroma of a strawberry matters more than the sugar content in how we perceive a strawberry’s sweetness!
Wild strawberries were an enormously important food source for the Native people that lived in the Great Lakes area prior to the government “resettlement” policy (the Indian Removal Act of 1830) that forced Native tribes off of their ancestral lands. The Anishinaabeg people were a cultural group that included many tribes in the Great Lakes region, and the largest tribes that inhabited southeast Michigan were the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Potowatami (Bode’wadmi). The tribes were semi-nomadic, migrating with the seasons. When springtime turned to early summer, the tribes would settle along the shores of lakes to catch fish and freshwater fowl, and to forage the woodlands for birch bark and wild berries. They marked the passage of time and seasons by the moon, and the June full moon was named Ode’imini-giizis (the Strawberry Moon). The full Strawberry Moon rises this coming Saturday, June 3!
You can find wild strawberries in the woods, of course, but the strawberries we cultivate now are the result of cross between two wild strawberry varieties (both transported from the Americas to Europe) in France in the 1700s.
It’s almost time for strawberry u-picks to open their doors, and we recommend getting on their waiting lists and checking Facebook sites to be in the know. It’s a fairly short season (mostly in June and early July); strawberries are easy to pick, and incredible when they are fresh from the field! Two local u-picks are:
Rowe’s Produce Farm (Ypsilanti) - strawberries and peas in June/July!
Honey Bee U-Pick (Ann Arbor) - strawberries in June/July!
Some of our other favorite produce items popping up at farmers’ markets right now include asparagus, herbs, peas, potatoes, and rhubarb. If you’re not sure what to do with a farmers’ market haul, get in touch with us, and we can design a cooking class just for you! We’re also happy to share some of our favorite recipes! The Newton of Ypsilanti’s own Chef Allison Anastasio will be doing a cooking demonstration at the Ann Arbor Farmers’ Market on June 7, 2023 at 11am (that’s a Wednesday market!). She’ll be whipping up a few delicious items that feature the spring/early summer bounty of our local farms.
