From the Toronto Star:
Mexican labourers plant strawberries behind the tractor of Bert Andrews, whose farm is now the only one left growing them around Milton.
Perilous exchange sees rich farmland around the GTA sprouting subdivisions
Bert Andrews sits atop his tractor in the middle of a chocolate milkshake field.
The earth below his giant wheels is grey-brown and frothy — so soft it crumbles like foam, so moist it doesn’t raise dust. It’s also teeming with nutrients.
Just perfect for strawberries.
“This is the nicest soil you can find,” Andrews says, looking over his shoulder at the row of Mexican labourers he’s towing behind him on a finger planter.
The planter looks like a rickety CNE ride. It has four metal seats separated by miniature wheels with funnel spokes. Each labourer sits behind a stack of young, tender strawberry plants, and when a spoke comes up, he slots a plant in. The wheel spins it down and – click – plants it in the ground with a little squirt of water.
Four other workers with shovels follow behind slowly, doing quality control — tucking in exposed roots; packing down earth.
“You missed one there,” Andrews says, pointing to a plant the size of one of his fingers on the ground. He’s spent $9,000 this year on strawberry plants alone. He wants to make sure they survive.
While the pumpkins he’ll plant next year draw bigger crowds, strawberries are his biggest seller.
Ontario strawberries burst onto the scene in late June. Four weeks of mouth-bursting sweetness reminds us briefly that strawberries — like everything grown from the earth — have a season, and that some things are worth waiting for.
When Andrews bought his farm just north of Milton almost 30 years ago, there were six other strawberry growers in the area. He’s the only one left.
Once a bustling farming hub, the area has become a distant suburb of Toronto. The farm equipment dealerships have all left. Brick mansions have replaced barns. And fields that once sprouted wheat and sweet corn are now golf fairways.
It’s a perilous exchange. The farmland around Toronto is among the best in the country. It’s ranked almost exclusively class one and two — making it ideal for everything from strawberries to sweet corn. But increasingly, we’re planting subdivisions on it.
The Greater Toronto area lost 16 per cent of its farms between 1996 and 2001. Since then, another 5 per cent have vanished.
Once lost, the farmland can’t be replaced. The ground elsewhere just isn’t as fertile, and the climate not as generous. One farmer who moved fewer than 20 kilometres from Burlington to Waterdown lost the moderating effect of the lake, and with it, two whole weeks of the growing season.
“We need to be aware what w’re giving up,” says Margaret Walton, a Muskoka planner specializing in Ontario agriculture. “We can build houses anywhere. Why do we all have to live on prime farmland?”
What makes the land around Toronto so good? When the glaciers receded 10,000 years ago, they left minerals essential for plants — magnesium, potassium, calcium, zinc. The resulting soil is a fine mix of sand, silt and clay, making it easy to manage. It clumps well, allowing roots to take hold, but not suffocating them after a rainfall. And it’s deep and relatively stone-free. “That’s the ideal,” says Ray McBride, a soil-science professor at the University of Guelph. “That’s why Toronto is where it is. Pioneers looked at the area and saw it had sandy, good soil, lots of water, and not a lot of snowfall.”
Even more important than the soil is the climate. We have more frost-free days here than almost anywhere else in the province.
Despite those advantages, we truck in as much as 80 per cent of our fruit and vegetables.
We could soon be trucking it all in.
Even in the heart of our strawberry season, Loblaws sells California imports cheaper than Andrews can at his own farm.
It’s an economy of scale. California boasts seven times Ontario’s strawberry fields — 14,000 hectares compared to 2,000. The state grows them all year round, which is why you can still find them in January.
The only advantage Ontario growers have is your mouth. “They’re picking (California strawberries) when they’re not ripe, so they’re not going to be as sweet,” says Andrews.
It’s sunny and warm — perfect for planting. Big fat clouds dot the sky. A train moans in the distance, and Porfirio Contreras Vazquez, one of his workers, is singing a love song. “Tengo mied.”
These plants won’t bear fruit until next summer, when they’ve matured and begun to fill in — sending out sprout-like runners, which root down into the earth, forming “daughter” plants. Those then will put out delicate white flowers next May, which, if pollinated by one of the bees Andrews rents from a local beekeeper, will form into berries.
Given enough water, no pests and winter protection, this tiny plant will grow more than 100 berries over the next three — maybe four — years, before Andrews ploughs it under to make way for winter wheat or sweet corn.
“They just get old and not productive — like a lot of things,” chuckles Andrews, 63.
Having finished planting the last row, the Mexicans head back to the farm for lunch. Andrews follows slowly behind them on his tractor.
Halfway up the field, something catches his eye. He leaps down, bounding like a fawn along the straw that separates the row of calf-high strawberry plants that he put down two summers ago.
There, at the top, in a cluster of neon-green berries, are two blood-red ones. “That’s what it’s all about,” Andrews says triumphantly. “All this effort, all this work, now we’re seeing, as they say, the fruit.”
The Last Straw: Did you know?
- Strawberry farmers traditionally put straw between rows. Hence the name, although some historians peg it to how strawberries “strew” or spread through tendrils.
- The straw is used for many things. In winter, , it is put on top of the plants to protect them. In summer, it becomes mulch, keeping down weeds, and also makes for softer picking on your knees.
- As with apples, there are many varieties of strawberries. They vary in shape, size, colour and time of ripening. A farmer can extend the season by two weeks by growing Annapolis berries, which ripen first in June, midseason Miras, and late-blooming Cabots, which bear fruit at the end of June.
- “Day-neutral” berries are becoming more common in Ontario. From California, they don’t depend on a certain amount of daylight to bloom, putting out berries through the summer and into the fall. Unlike local varieties, they are usually grown in raised beds, covered by plastic. Both techniques aim to keep the soil warm during the fall and spring.
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