Weird and Wonderful Crops
You already know about “ugly produce,” but have you thought about “weird crops”? These outliers are kissing cousins to their ugly stall mates at your local farmers’ market — the items that look a little strange yet provide taste and nutrition that’s as good as (and sometimes better than) their more familiar counterparts.
Like ugly produce, weird crops are almost everywhere — you just need to look a little harder to find them. Here at edible, we’ve already given you the inside scoop on Fraser Valley fringe crops over the years by introducing you to locally grown saffron, haskap berries and rice. But, surprise, there’s so much more taking root in the valley these days.
If you announced a pop quiz on good eats growing in the Fraser Valley, most people would answer corn, berries and poultry. There’s good reason for that: these are indeed some of the most prevalent agricultural outputs in the area. Abbotsford ranks first on the Canadian agriculture scene for crop diversity, but the area is best known for just a few crops, and they comprise most of the dollars earned in the region.
So weird crops remain somewhat underground, but those in the know recognize that what these sleepers lack in numbers, they make up for in impact.
Ground cherries at Sweet Earth Farms
Miranda Chiasson of Sweet Earth Farms spends every December dreaming not of sugar plums, but about the next year’s crops. Then she creates Christmas in July by growing and distributing weekly CSA boxes for the extensive fan — oops, customer — base that she and her husband James Stobbe have created through their Ryder Lake (Chilliwack) farm.
Sweet Earth Farms customers know they can count on CSA boxes full of exciting new delights and familiar favourites. To keep this magic alive, Chiasson is always on the lookout for more. That’s what happened when she saw “Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherries” in a seed catalogue one cold December morning a few years ago.
“I just thought, oh, that sounds cute,” she recalls. “I didn’t even know what a ground cherry was. Or I thought I didn’t.”
You might think you don’t, either, but like Chiasson, you’re probably wrong. Although ground cherries are known by a bewildering array of names (Physalis peruviana, Physalis pruinose, Peruvian ground cherries, Cape gooseberries, golden berries, husk cherries, husk tomatoes, etc), most of us have encountered these strange little orbs swaddled by papery sheaths in the same place: decorating our dessert plates at fine dining establishments. It’s like finding a tiny slightly sweet red tomatillo where you’d least expect it.
And most of us probably reacted like Chiasson did: “What is it? Do I eat it? I mean, it’s on my plate, so… probably?” And then, after the little pop and crunch between your teeth, “I’m not sure what just happened in my mouth, but… I think I like it?”
This gustatory uncertainty stems from the simultaneously sweet, tart and dryly astringent sensation the ground cherry activates, punching in way higher than its weight category suggests. The taste sensation remains surprising each time you encounter it, making this a beguiling addition to many sweet and savoury dishes. That’s right — these switch hitters make amazing jam, compotes, chutney, salsa and additions to fruit crisp or pizza. They also freeze well and kids love them.
Which is why it’s not surprising that Chiasson’s CSA customers started clambering for more as soon as she began sprinkling a few extras into their cherry tomato baskets when she had ground cherries to spare after her restaurant customers’ orders were filled.
“I love introducing my customers to interesting produce they may not have encountered before. It’s so much fun — like being a tour guide. Usually we include a fact sheet and some recipe suggestions, but with the ground cherries we didn’t because there were so few of them.”
This might account for some of the intensity in her customers’ reactions. “Everyone kept messaging me. What is that? Will you have more next week? Can I get a whole pint?”
Fortunately ground cherries are easy to grow, thrive in a variety of growing conditions, propagate themselves exponentially, and enjoy high demand from the restaurant trade. That’s an all-round win for small livelihood farmers like Chiasson and Stobbe.
The biggest pain point for farmers is harvesting the little darlings. They’re called ground cherries for a reason: they drop from the bush when ripe and need to be gathered from the ground.
One of the reasons Sweet Earth Farms has become such a successful endeavour is the collective creativity Chiasson and Stobbe generate. He’s an engineer, forever tinkering with production and productivity hacks on the farm — and he wasn’t going to let some little upstart crop get the better of him. As a black-belt problem solver, he’s devised a harvest workaround that makes it a breeze getting the crop off the ground and into their customers’ delivery boxes. (We’d like to tell you about the workaround, but that’s top secret proprietorial intel.)
With this addition now smoothly integrated into her product offerings, it’s on to the next challenge. Melons. All different types, shapes and sizes. “I’m really excited about the weird little baby melons,” Chiasson enthuses. “This season we’re trying out a whole bunch of different Asian melons. There’s one that’s around the size of a naval orange that I’m really hoping will work well for our CSA boxes.”
Sweet Earth Farms
49744 Elk View Rd., Chilliwack
sweetearthfarms.ca | 604.751.3451 | @sweetearth_farms
Melons at Mercado Fresh Farms
While melons in general couldn’t be considered a weird crop, chances are that watermelon, cantaloupe or specialty Asian melons don’t come to mind immediately when we’re thinking about mainstays of local Fraser Valley produce.
There’s no doubt the Fraser Valley, with its fertile soil, plentiful irrigation and hot summers, provides ideal growing conditions for many melon varieties. But melons are a tricky crop, requiring extensive hand labour, specialized expertise and a significant land base — all of which adds up to a melon that costs double what people are used to paying at the grocery store. Once you’ve tasted the rich, sweet depth of a perfectly ripe watermelon still warm from the sun, though, there’s no going back. As the demand for local, in-season everything continues to grow, with more and more shoppers looking for their favourite foods at their favourite farmers’ market stalls and farm stands, savvy farmers are stepping up to meet the need.
Chiasson isn’t alone in recognizing the potential for melons to become a local delicacy. Local Harvest has been offering watermelon and cantaloupe for years. Archway Urban Farm is branching out into watermelons this year. Small scale growers such as husband-and-wife team Ben and Christiane Yurkiw at Mercado Fresh Farms are also meeting the local demand.
This summer, the Yurkiws are building on their initial success as purveyors of watermelons to an appreciative local audience of Yarrowites. This fan base, with their obsessive monitoring of the neighbourhood Facebook page in anticipation of the next release, is how Miranda Chiasson heard about “the watermelon guy” as Ben is known locally. After one of her CSA customers raved about the Yurkiws’ amazingly flavourful watermelons, Chiasson tried them for herself and couldn’t get enough.
So when Chiasson and Stobbe decided to try growing melons at Sweet Earth Farms, reaching out to the Yurkiws to request a tour of Mercado Fresh Farms was a natural next step. They got more than they bargained for, because nowadays there’s a lot more than melon fields. True to its name of mercado, which means “market” in Portuguese (Christiane is Brazilian), the Yurkiws are preparing to serve more customers.
In 2023, the Yurkiws increased the size of their family with the arrival of their baby daughter, the amount of land in production on their farm and their product line. Altogether, this meant a shift in their focus towards family and food, and the best way to do this, they figured, was for Christiane to work on building up the farm, transforming it from a delicious experiment into a viable market stand. That summer, the Yurkiws expanded their original focus on watermelons to try growing a wide range of musk melons. Everything grew, but they weren’t satisfied with the quality or yield of most varieties.
That’s because to them, the most important element of their produce is the taste. It’s why they’re in the game, according to Ben. “We want to grow food that tastes good. We will only provide our customers with what we know tastes good.”
With that benchmark established, they’ve narrowed the selection for 2024. “We plan to focus on providing watermelon, both seeded and seedless, in the ice box size (eight to 12 pounds), and to grow some Santa Claus melons and cantaloupe. We’ll also have a melon that resembles a cantaloupe, with white flesh and a citrus flavour that’s sometimes slightly sour, which we call the “toadskin” melon as a direct translation from the name of this variety, Piel de Sapo, which means ‘skin of a toad’.”
Beyond these “weird crops,” the Yurkiws are also growing a range of regular veggies to support their goal of developing the farm stand into a farm market. This season, they’re planning to open for weekend business at the beginning of August.“Our commitment is to sell what we grow and provide quality produce with a focus on flavour. The customer response is very appreciative, and I think this really drives us forward to continue. We’ve had people reach out asking if we plan to continue again this year,” Ben says.
Mercado Fresh Farms
4487 Boundary Rd., Abbotsford
@mercadofreshfarms
Loofah at Barrowtown Elementary School Farm
These two tales of weird crop happy endings aren’t the whole story, though. There are so many out there, with more to come.
Take Barrowtown Elementary School, for example. The school community of teachers, parents, students and principal Michelle Basran collectively developed an agricultural focus while rebuilding the schoolyard after it was destroyed in the 2021 flooding. The first stage of the school farm was straightforward: producing familiar, loveable food — think carrots, eggs, pumpkins, garlic — for selling (and giving) to community members.
Since then they’ve branched out into flowers and are becoming a popular spot to pick up a pretty posy on the way home from work or the way to a dinner party. Nothing weird about any of that. But next steps could include bees and goats. And currently they’re immersed in a creative approach to fundraising that involves the entire school community: loofah.
You thought loofah was an ocean plant, didn’t you? Don’t worry. We did too. But it’s not. You can grow it in a greenhouse or garden — just like its cousins, cucumbers, squash and melons.
Despite its conventional habitat, loofah is without a doubt a bona fi de weird crop — not just weird for the Fraser Valley. Loofah has been cultivated for centuries, because it’s a simple way to produce a reliable, long lasting scrubber (no need to restrict it to the bathroom for exfoliating — this powerhouse works all over the house). You just plant the seeds in the spring, train the vines up a trellis in a warm area and wait until the end of summer until they’re fully grown.
So far, so good, but here comes the weird part: once you’ve harvested the loofah at peak wrinkly browness (when it looks like it’s rotting, you’re there), you strip off the skin until the interior network of fibres is revealed. You’ll recognize that easily, because it looks exactly like the loofah sponge you know and love from the drugstore. Then you wash off the goop and seeds, let it dry and get to scrubbing.
It’s simple enough for the kindergarten through Grade 5 students at Barrowtown to complete with support from their teachers. Then they’ll process, package and market the fi nished product as a fundraiser to support their agricultural program. Easy peasy, local, sustainable, in-demand.
Which isn’t weird at all.
With tilapia, gooseberries, purple caulifl ower, sweet potatoes and so much more growing in the Fraser Valley, you could feast for days on new-to-you produce. And it’s all thanks to the creative, curious, committed local farmers who make the this valley what it is today — a bounty of homegrown delights ranging from pantry staples to special treats.
Barrowtown Elementary School
barrowtown.abbyschools.ca | 604.854.5996 | @barrowtown
