We’ve been growing pots of strawberries for about five years now, and while they are always smaller than their commercial cousins, the flavour has more than made up for their size. Now, there is actual, real research that explains why home grown tastes better:
The culprit? Fungicide. Apparently fungicides not only kill fungus, they can also have a detrimental effect on the strawberry’s ability to produce sugars and other nutrients. Ergo, the commercial products don’t taste as sweet as home grown. 😀
As home gardeners, we’ve also noticed that our tomatoes are incredibly sweet. Much sweeter than the ones I used to buy from the supermarket. If anyone knows why, I’d love to know.
Oh, and it goes without saying that NOTHING in our garden is sprayed with herbicides, pesticides or fungicides. We are as organic as a home garden can be without being officially certified. I’m proud of that. 🙂
The apple you see on that plate is the apple I just picked from my tree. I picked it, buffed it against my shirt and bit into it. Crisp but not ‘rock hard’, juicy and…so sweet the flavour was like an explosion in my mouth!
The apple in question is a Fuji, and Fuji are one of the sweetest of the commercial apples, but my home-grown beauty was a factor of ten sweeter because I didn’t pick it until it was fully ripe. Commercial apples are picked earlier and stored in a cool room to increase their ‘shelf life’ in the supermarket. Convenience and greater profits for the supermarket, a loss for the consumer.
How much of a loss?
I can only guess at the nutritional loss, but I can tell you that my apples taste amazing. And! The land on which they grew has not been sprayed for the 16 years of my stewardship. That’s how long we’ve lived here in Warrandyte. As the block was originally a horse paddock, it’s probably been herbicide and pesticide free for much longer than that. For me though, the bottom line is flavour.
I stopped buying commercial apricots the year my apricot tree had its first crop. The flavour of that warm, sun-ripened fruit took me back to my childhood when my Dad grew a few fruit trees in the back yard. The one I remember even now is the nectarine tree. It was big enough for an eight year old to climb without getting stuck, and I’d sit in its branches, eating nectarines.
In fact, there have been home-grown fruit trees in my life for all but a few years in my twenties when I was renting. There have been fruit trees in the Offspring’s life too, and I remember the look of wonder on a young nephew’s face when he picked a ripe apricot from my tree and tasted it for the first time. These are the moments that can trigger life-long food choices, and those food choices can influence life-long health.
Many schools in Australia have created veggie patches for the kids to tend and taste, which is great, but what about the home garden? How many kids get to go home after school and pick a sun-ripened apple for a snack instead of something that comes in a packet? And what better reason for a kid to go outside into the fresh air than to forage in the garden?
“Oh, we’re too busy to grow fruit!”
“The garden is too small.”
“I don’t have time to look after fruit trees. Just mowing the damn grass is enough.”
“Don’t you have to spray them to stop the bugs and stuff? I don’t want the kids to eat stuff that’s been sprayed.”
The excuses are legion, but I believe the root excuse, the one that no one acknowledges is that modern parents grew up eating only commercial fruit and vegetables so they literally have no idea what ‘real’ fruit tastes like. As a result, they can’t see the value of growing fruit trees.
To those parents I say – “Just give one fruit tree a try.”
My apple tree is small, and it has three different apples grafted onto it. For a while I thought the alpacas had ‘pruned’ one of the grafted branches to death, but it came back, and this year it is covered with so much fruit I’ve had to hold the branches up with ropes! Sadly I can’t remember what variety this rejuvenated graft belongs to.
Anyway, my point is that I did not take care of my apple tree for a long time, but it survived and when I gave it some protection [from the alpacas], and a bit of compost and mulch, it roared back with a truly bumper crop. Just in time for autumn/winter.
Feijoas are easy to grow too. They’re the small, dark green fruit in front of the apples:
Fuji apples and Feijoas
C’mon, parents. You don’t need a lot of space to grow one, single fruit tree, and the benefits will astound you. More importantly, you will see that same look of wonder on your kids’ faces the first time they taste fruit that actually has a flavour. Find a sunny spot and plant a fruit tree. Your kids will be the beneficiaries.
I couldn’t resist showing you the alpaca-possum-bird-proof enclosure the Offspring and I built for the apple tree:
This poor little tree almost died a couple of years ago…now look at it, 3 different grafted apples, all fruiting like crazy. We also have 4 different kinds of peaches, a quince tree and a couple of fejoia that look as if they’re going to have a bumper crop too.
If you want to see more luscious photos of home grown produce, check out my friend Dale’s post. She and her partner live in NSW where the weather is more tropical. She also has a green thumb, and it shows. 🙂
As the Offspring and I are totally paranoid about decontaminating everything that comes to the house, fresh vegetables, especially the ones eaten raw, have been an issue. So, like a lot of our neighbours, we sowed some seeds and waited for our own produce to appear. And here it is!
Snow peas! You have no idea how much pleasure it gave us to harvest these beautiful, fresh peas. I think this was the moment that the Offspring really got the gardening bug. 🙂
But there was better to come. This is what the Offspring turned those lovely fresh peas into:
Homemade vegetable stir fry with singapore noodles
I have to tell you, the Offspring’s stir fry was delicious. It included the snow peas [of course], fresh red capsicum, fresh wombok cabbage, fresh spring onions, frozen broccoli and ‘shelf fresh’ singapore noodles.
The best things in life really do boil down to just a few simple things: good food, good music and good people. 🙂 To all the good people in the US – you did. You did it. Nothing can stop the march of progress now. 🙂
Meeka's Mind 