Strawberry Fields

March 31, 2010

Had a great tour of an Tanaka organic family farm in Irvine CA culminating in picking fresh strawberries. Our guide made a deal with the children that they could pick strawberries at the end of the tour IF they promised to try all the vegetables we would seeing growing and get to sample as the tour progressed. All of them did try those actively growing now: lettuce, celery, carrots, sugar snap peas, onions including the roots which we were told were also edible. We made quite a haul taking home the extras of all those as well as our wonderful fresh-as-can-be strawberries.

This particular farm has a mission to educate and entertain families year round on the value of healthy eating with regular tours that are taken by school and other children’s groups where they have the opportunity to see where their food comes from and are encouraged to eat these foods and hopefully substitute them at least a bit for the processed foods that are so easily available. It’s a useful program in combating the obesity epidemic. They emphasize a different crop for tours with each season from strawberries, to watermelon and pumpkins and Christmas trees but they grow many types of vegetables throughout the year-round growing season. The fields were just gorgeous with all those vitamins captured in the crops with their multicolored green and red leaf lettuce to beets, radishes and so forth (those are the largest red globe radishes I’ve ever seen in the last picture with the strawberries and peas and they are DE-licious [eat your heart out, Jim]). We saw the start of the warm season crops they’re just planting of squash and tomatoes, bean etc. Yummmmmmm! A good time was had by all up to an including preparing all these goodies for our dinner..