Welcome to Sunday Morn Musings.  This is my weekly free fall – writing about whatever it is that occupies the mind on a Sunday Morn.  The idea of a “no topic” posting is the stepchild to a blog I used to write:  Four O’Clock Thursdays which is still up there if you want to check it out – more likely, I will repurpose and republish some of those posts here over time.  On Sunday Morn Musings the topic may be about blogging but just as likely it may not.

When shopping for fresh produce I stay away from the pure red, blemish free, perfectly round, still attached to its vine, tomato.  Instead, I carefully pick through the adjacent bin, the one with the imperfect tomatoes looking for perfect tomatoes.  I know.  That is a contradiction.   I do this even in the winter when the imperfect ones come from far away lands and have the taste and feel of cardboard rather than fruit.  I rationalize this seemingly irrational preference by telling myself that at least they, the imperfects, have grown in soil.

I go for the organics once again lulling my brain into thinking that that is the better choice.   In actual fact, I really don’t know.  I try to be informed and in doing so, I know that not everything that I am fed as  fact is actually so.

So what’s wrong with the perfect tomatoes?  Probably nothing.  Certainly agricultural scientists will tell you that not only are the perfects a beauty to behold but that they are every bit as nutritional as the imperfects, perhaps even more so.  You see, they are grown in big glass houses.  Their little feet know nothing of the feel of having been germinated in rich black soil, of what it is like to grow up in the open fields, feeding on minerals and other nutrients of that soil, to move in the gentle soughing of a breeze, drink in the water as it falls from the sky, to bask in the sun’s rays.

The perfects, as I said, grow in glass houses. They call them greenhouses, not to be confused with hothouses in which the produce grown is merely given a leg up to the little seedlings to survive in an otherwise cold climate where summers come late and leave early.  No these are industrial parks housing acres upon acres of hydroponic farming.  These are not farms.  They are factories.

As the word hydro suggests this is water gardening taken to scientific horticultural heights that produces  designer fruits and vegetables.  Tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, bell peppers (capsicum to those in the southern hemisphere) and now even kiwis and who knows whatever else are grown in perlite, which is a natural occurring glass substance that has a relatively high water content.

What goes against my grain is that these little darlings that find their way to the grocers and then our tables are grown in a cocktail thrown together by a chemist – an adroit chemist no less who carefully measures out the right mix and dose of petrochemicals so that a tomato grows up to look like one, that it does not mistakenly get crossed with a cucumber or a bell pepper.  The system is rigged to drip the right amount at the right intervals to ensure that our food on the vine is getting all the nutrition it needs to look  and taste like it’s hardier cousin that has grown out in the open.

Horticulturalists will tell you that these fruits and veggies are just as nutritional as the ground grown variety, perhaps even more so and that they taste even better.

That, I suppose depends on your taste buds.

When you’ve grown up on fresh produce that was available only in season, when it was picked only when it was ripe and ready for the local market as I have, then your taste buds are otherwise informed.   I eagerly look forward to the opening of the local farmers markets.  Not all are created equal – some still bring in fruits and veggies that the local super markets carry from other countries, don’t understand that.

No, I like the weekend kind of farmers markets, where the farmer and his family man the stalls and you can just see them brimming with pride at the tasty food that they have grown on their farms.  Often they have varieties of produce that is just not available elsewhere and sometimes, some even sell pickled produce or jams that they made themselves. Yum!  Everything costs more but I`ll gladly forgo a latte or two to buy farmer direct.

If you have occasion to drive in rural farming areas as I do, you will come across farmers roadside stands.  I always stop and buy.  They only sell that which they grow.  My favorites are the corn stands.  I think that the tastiest corn is that which is picked minutes before the ears are shucked and put into the boiling pot, but the next best is the corn that was picked that morning and wastes not a day between picking and pot.  Corn, I think, is the most susceptible of veggies to losing its natural sweetness with the passing of each hour and a day is well, too much.

What I also like about the produce that grows in earth is that the tastes vary according to the soil its grown in.   Tomatoes grown in the Fraser Valley taste different from those grown in Lillooet.They are both to die for.  The greenhouse tomato that is grown in metro Vancouver tastes the same as the one that is grown in Arizona or New Brunswick.  It is the malling of agriculture … you know how mega malls all have the same designer stores.

I love the earthy smell of freshly tilled soil in the spring.  This year we have had a warm winter.  Already the farmers are tilling the soil.  Birds flock to feast on worms and whatever else it is that freshly tilled soil exposes.  I love this ritual – sort of like the rites of spring and therefore of nature and life.

But life changes – I don’t know about nature.  Every year as I go past familiar farms it seems that their numbers are decreasing.  If it’s not yet another housing development then it’s another greenhouse.

To me they look ugly.  They are a blight on the landscape.  The trend is to plant a thick and wide belt of trees running alongside the roadway between the pavement and the glass – out of sight, out of mind.  They tell us that greenhouses are only allowed to be constructed on farm soil that is poor and not suitable for traditional farming.

We live in a rich and fertile valley fed by the mighty Fraser River.  For more than a century families have  farmed the black earth of these lands and still do today but their numbers seem to be not as many.

I had no idea there was so much of this land that was not suited for farming.