The Market gives us a chance to discover on our own that a berry isn’t just a berry, and a cherry isn’t just a cherry. Each fruit has a number of cultivars, varieties with different tastes, characteristics and growing requirements.
Take apples for example. We recognize that a Honeycrisp apple looks and tastes a little different from a Granny Smith. The same goes for other fruits, but we’re not accustomed to seeing named varieties of most fruits in our grocery stores because generally our grocery stories don’t stock more than one or two cultivars of fruits other than apples. It’s at the Market where we can find the rich variety that nature and plant researchers have created for us.
Last week, we had Skeena, Van, Bing and Rainier cherries. The red cherries, the Skeena, Van and Bing, are each a little different from the other. As for strawberries, for the first few weeks of the Market, farmers brought the luscious Honeoye cultivar with its perfect sweetness and fragrance. We enjoyed the Cascade Dawn raspberries, and now we’re indulging in the much-coveted Tulameen variety, which were bred in British Columbia in the 1980s.
If you stop by Crawford Farms, you can participate in a blueberry taste-testing. Con
nie Crawford from Prosser lines up her four types of blueberries for you to sample, Duke, Legacy, Spartan and Bluecrop. We tasters last week had quite a discussion about our preferences, and we all brought home our choices. But some choices are hard.
