West Michigan Fruit Production Devastated by Bizarre Weather

In November 2009 I wrote a diary titled the Fragile Climate of Fruit Growing Perfection. In in I talked about West Michigan's ideal microclimate for fruit production and how fragile those perfect conditions are. Well...this year we're seeing a catastrophic collapse in West Michigan's fruit production due to weeks of record breaking high temperatures in late February to mid March combined with a winter without a prolonged hard frost.

Sure sure...everybody knows Michigan and manufacturing. Michigan and cars. Michigan and the factory, machinist thing. Yadda yadda. That's there.

But the Michigan I know is also the Michigan among the top fruit producing regions in American. Michigan, a major producer of tart cherries, blueberrries, apples, juice grapes, pears, peaches, plums, strawberries, raspberries, asparagus, the leading producer of black beans and second largest producer of dried beans. West Michigan is peppered with city and street names like Fruitport, Fruitland Township, Fruitvale road, Orchard View...

The Farmer's market overflows with an amazing variety of local, seasonal produce and my wife has a cherry jam to die for that includes no fewer than seven varieties of local cherries.

But this year, all along the West Michigan coastline, the strange weather this year has devestated the crops....


We didn't have a prolonged hard frost this winter. It was warm. Very little ice or snow....ALL. WINTER. LONG.

Blueberries:

Because of the warm winter the blueberries didn't go into a period of dormancy. That means that many areas are likely to have very unproductive blueberries this year.



But because of the record breaking March weather, many of the fruit crops bloomed early....

....too early.

And are now getting killed by hard frosts.

Juice Grapes:

Frost wipes out juice grapes in southwest Michigan
A devastating frost has wiped out grapes grown for juice in southwestern Michigan.

John Jasper, a surveyor for Welch’s Foods, tells Channel 57 that he went through hundreds of acres before even finding a live bud. He estimates more than 10,000 acres were destroyed Thursday, mostly in Berrien, Cass and Van Buren counties.

Jasper says Welch’s gets approximately 17% of its grapes from southwestern Michigan. He says the company could be forced to change recipes for some products.

"The apple crop at Kercher's Sunrise Orchards in Goshen was also heavily damaged, the owner told us Sunday."

Tart Cherries:

NW Michigan Cherry Crop Takes Hit After Record-Busting March; 50-70% Of Fruit Lost In Hard Freeze

A hard freeze has wiped out a big portion of the cherry crop in Northwest Michigan this spring. The area produces more than half the state’s cherries that end up in desserts, juice and as dried fruit.

Asparagus:

Asparagus came up early, far before the migrant workers who usually pick it start to show up. Farmers are scrambling to find locals willing to pick asparagus....but you'll notice I'm sitting here blogging instead of traveling 40 miles to the north to pick asparagus.

Strawberry farmers, apricot farmers, apple and peach farmers....everybody is getting hit.

Mark Longstroth, a fruit educator at the Michigan State University Extension, said half an hour at 28 degrees around bloom time will cause damage and half an hour at 25 degrees could take 90 percent of the crop

Fruit production is a major economic driver in West Michigan, and was one of the few stable and even growing spots during the decade long Michigan recession. This year the entire region and fruit growing industry is getting hit hard.

Michigan's fruit growers are going to need some Federal relief to make it through to the next year.

This is our food supply, folks.

Drying out some pears

Pears. I found bosc pears on sale at the store, so I snapped up quite a few.

One of the great things about preserving foods is that when things are crazy cheap, you can buy lots of it and save it for when it's not. Lately I've been a huge fan of dehydration. I've got one of those little electric dehydrators plugged into the wall and the little fella seems to do what I ask of him without much in the way of complaint.

Canning is fine and all...but dehydration is a lot less work and has the added benefit of shrinking the food down to a much more easily storageable size. Also brings out the sweetness of many fruits.

So there's that.

It's Simple, Really...I Add Love and Scrabble to My Homemade Hot Sauce

People often ask me "Mr. Critic, what IS the SECRET to your delicious hot sauce?"

And I say to them "It's simple really, I use love, peppers and vinegar. And apparently Scrabble has something to do with it, too, as you can see by the picture."

I've recently fallen deeply in love with spicy foods and prefer, now, to make my own hot sauce rather than buy it at the store. That little glass cylinder of hot sauce there is approximately a third of a cup, and cost no more than 20 cents to make.

I grow and dry many of my own peppers, but I've also found an Asian market in town, on 3rd street near Mia and Grace (if you're into the locavore hipster foods thing) or the Ice Pick (if you're more into mosh pits and surgical staples thing) which sells good sized bags of dried Thai peppers for two bucks.

I used a small handful of peppers for this batch. Make sure to have a small, resealable glass container, some vinegar and something to mix with handy (like a chop stick or a small spoon).

1. Grind the dried peppers in a coffee grinder.

2. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT's GOOD DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT open the coffee grinder right away or you'll get a lungful of powdered, vapoized Thai peppers. Get me? So just wait five minutes while the dust settles.

3. Dump the powder into the glass.

4. Mix in pure vinegar, mixing all the way until the sauce is the consistency you want.

There. You're done. I do have a food drier so I dry some of my own peppers. The orange-ish pepper there is a dried habanero pepper from my mother's garden. Funny story about those....she thought she had planted sweet bell peppers and got all these tiny little orange peppers. So did I, and I ate one when I went to drop my son off at her house.

Ouch. That was before my love affair with spicy foods.

In other news...that other container up there is a re-used maple syrup container. Filled it with some dried Thai peppers and some jalapeño peppers and then filled it with vinegar. I use the hot pepper infused vinegar for cooking.

So there's that.

Please Help a Muskegon Community Garden win $500 and National Attention

A local, Musekgon community garden in a poor to low income neighborhood is currently coming in a close 3rd place to win $500 and some national attention from a write up in Mother Earth News...and all we need is a measly couple dozen more votes to push us over the edge to FIRST place.

Please take 45 seconds to vote in the Fabulous Food Garden contest. Create an account, skip all the account setup screens with the button on the lower left as you log in, and then vote for Love Community Garden!

I don't want to get down on the other gardens currently ahead of Love Community Garden. They're fine veggie gardens. But they're not producing fresh fruits and vegetables to poor communities, or providing fresh vegetables for home bound seniors.

For the people and by the people in downtown Muskegon, Michigan. We deliver food to home bound seniors while also having 12 families who grow all natural food for home use.

The organizer, Morning Bear, holds summer programs for area children to teach them how to garden and grow their own food. They hold community concerts there, and community art projects, and offer a gathering space for people who want to organize around something important for the community.

Love Community Garden is quite an accomplishment. It was started on an empty lot owned by a local church, and the community pitched in to create a rain barrel watering system, a community made pergola, a relaxing place to sit and smell wild flowers, or pick raspberries and strawberries, and blackberries. It's a learning center, and a place of peace and respite, and source of nourishment, and a gathering place for the community.

What could $500 do for this community garden? It could continue enriching the neighborhood where it grows.

You wanna see a ray of hopefulness? A thing of beauty? A world where people come together to make their tiny corner of the world the best place they can?

This is it. THIS is it.

Plus...whenever I need advice on my own organic garden, I know I can go down to Love Community Garden in the summer and Morning Bear will be there to give me some great advice.

Please take just a minute to vote for Love Community Garden in Muskegon, folks.

Thanks!

HERE'S HOW TO DO IT!>>>>

If you already voted yesterday You're allowed to vote again each day until the end of October! And it's much easier the 2nd time.

If this is your first time voting, here's how to do it
1. Click Sign Up in the upper right
2. Enter your name and login info and click On to the next step...
3. CLICK SKIP THIS STEP for the next three screens.
4. Now return to the contest page.
5. Click the image for Love Community Garden.
6. Click the large Vote Here image found below the image gallery for Love Community Garden.

Let's make it easy for hardworking Americans to at least create FOOD

Big business...it's just another form of tyranny.

There.

I said it.

My family, we survive through small business. Not just my nuclear family. But my parents. And my grand parents on both sides.

Heck, my mother's grandfather lived through the Depression by baking bread and making candies and selling it and doing anything he could to get by. My tiny grandmother was told by old man Meijer that he would buy up any bread she could bring him. And so they brought him all they could. Of course, now Meijer is among the largest supermarket chains in the US.

My mother's grandfather was also farmer in south central Michigan. She has memories of visiting him in his home with no electricity, and pulling up potatoes and other foods from his garden to make dinner.

It's the small independence that makes for freedom. The ability to maintain our own means of production for food and the necessities of life.

And though our conservative pals would like us to believe that Government is making us dependent, they conveniently leave out the insidious creeping of big companies into our lives. They control the means of production. They establish monopolies and cartels that lock out smaller competitors, that lock out new ideas, and become the only show in town for low wage jobs where workers an interchangeable component, neither able to excel nor innovate within the workplace. Where a worker can be scrapped and replaced for any excuse.

What on earth am I prattling on about?

I don't know.

It's late. And it's been a pretty long walk of a lead in to talking about a new Farm Bill.

Nationally, nearly 27,000 midsized independent family farms have been driven out of business over the past five years, and the ones who have survived are being squeezed by a market that gives preferential treatment to big agribusinesses. The 2008 farm bill included some new reforms to protect small and medium-sized farmers who raise cattle, hogs, and chickens, but those reforms are being blocked by the handful of large processing companies that dominate the meat and poultry industries. Food & Watch and our allies are asking Senator Stabenow as Chair of the Agriculture Committee to stand up for Michigan’s small farm owners, consumers and the environment and support Fair Farm Rules.

It's the "Those Reforms are Being Blocked" thing that gets my goat. Somehow our leadership ("somehow", no doubt, being $$$$$$$$$$$$$$) is considering caving in to pressure from large farms to weaken the farm bill and make it HOSTILE to the independent farmers.

As if we want to dissuade more people from entering into agriculture. As if we want to make it harder for people, desperate to feed their families and make a go of it here, to get their hands dirty and create the American Dream from the very soil under our feet.

You really cannot get more hard working, honest, salt of the earth, hard core American bootstrapper than being an independent farmer for the love of all that's good.

Let's make it as easy as possible for hard working people to at least create FOOD. Contact your State Senator and tell them to stand up for small farmers. Especially if you're in the Michigan area, talk to Senator Stabenow.

Mmm...Just Got Back from a Grand Haven Fish Boil

Went down to Grand Haven for a fish boil. Whole small potatoes and onions and a pile of locally caught salmon all slathered in an unholy amount of butter. It was held right off the charter boat docks off of the Grand Haven boardwalk that leads all along the Grand River down to Lake Michigan.

Boiled fish? Heck yeah. It's a Great Lakes thing, and it's fantastic.

Fish boils are a classic Upper Great Lakes tradition which I believe has its roots in Scandinavian quarters of Wisconsin. The culinary tradition generally revolves around native whitefish or lake trout, but when King Salmon was introduced to control the invasive alewives, King Salmon got added to the menu, too. That particular boom in salmon lead to a fast popularization of fish boils...hell, there were huge fish EVERYWHERE, and easy to catch. People had to do SOMETHING with 'em.

At one point fish boils were just about as common as BBQs in the summer and fall months. Go over to a friends house, bring some fresh caught salmon, boil it in a kettle with potatoes and onions.

Now, I'm sure many of my friends across Lake Michigan from me in Wisconsin would scoff at my notion of salmon fish boils rather than whitefish or lake trout fish boils, but those dudes don't know what they're missing.

Here's a fish boil recipe on the Food Network to try this out yourself. Pay no mind to the massive quantity of salt. That's just to lower the boiling point of the water. I promise, it's not really that salty.