First Taste of Summer, Fresh Off The Vine
nytimes.com
PART of me still thinks it's a mistake to admit openly to my clandestine efforts to farm the bushy, overgrown strip of public land that runs down the middle of my street.
One day last week, I tried to sidetrack a neighbor who happened to notice I had dragged a sprinkler out to the road.
"Watering your illegal irises?" she asked.
Maybe I could buy her silence. "I'm splitting the purple ones this year," I said. "Want some?"
But the truth is that the perimeter flowers are merely a disguise for the covert action under way in the back of the plot: Operation Berries.
A couple of years ago, I transplanted my blueberry bushes and a tangle of raspberry canes to the median so they could bask in full sun every day. Then, to improve access, I laid a secret stone path among some camouflage clumps of chives.
Since then, my berry crop has steadily grown to the point where it has become feasible, in season, to send a daughter out a couple of mornings a week to pick blueberries for pancakes.
I envision someday having enough to share with the neighbors. But for now, call me selfish. The season for fresh produce that tastes the way it should — local corn, young lettuces, winy strawberries — is so terrifyingly short that it's no wonder a glutton like me would take drastic steps to grow a secret stash.
Even though I am also a regular at the local farm stand — I have, in fact, been haunting the place for weeks, waiting for the preseason "We Have Blooming Flowers" sign to be replaced with one that says simply "Local berries" — I never get enough. Especially raspberries. And cherries. Cherries. Cherries.
It was the dim memory of dark, juicy, lip-staining cherries that prompted me one day last week to wonder whether there might be other, less labor-intensive sources for fresh seasonal produce. That's how I discovered that online you can satisfy just about any seasonal addiction, at Web sites like www.orangesonline.com (which ships produce in season from Florida), chefshop.com (cherries from Washington State), www.urbanorganic.net (seasonal salad greens) and www.wickhamsfruitfarm.com (tomatoes from Long Island).
While this news was promising, it did raise questions: How do the sellers manage to ship such delicate merchandise? How much of a premium do you have to pay for it? And most pressing, at least for someone who would willingly schedule out-of-town trips around the expected delivery date of ripe Lapin cherries, how precisely can suppliers predict when fruit will be ripe enough to harvest?
I had vacations to plan, so my first call was to Greg Batch, a Washington fruit farmer whose 50-acre orchard will supply the gourmet food site Chefshop.com with three varieties of cherries — Bing, Lapin and Sweetheart — to customers willing to pay $45.95 for a five-pound order.
Bing ripens first. "At Chefshop
.com, it says that you anticipate `availability of the Bing this year to be around July 8 through the 12th,' " I said. "Can I enter that in my Palm?"
"There is a short window with cherries and we can only estimate when the harvest is going to be, based on the weather," Mr. Batch said. But customers who preorder will receive e-mail updates to confirm delivery dates, he said.
Mr. Batch said that the fruit would be picked ripe, then sent that same day via two-day shipping to customers. That is vastly superior treatment to what supermarket cherries get: they are picked hard, trucked around the country and then left in a distribution center before finally, after a week or two, arriving in the produce section.
"With the hand-picked ones we sell on Chefshop.com, the flavor will be more intense, with more of a crunch," Mr. Batch said.
Other companies, like Florida Fruit Shippers, which operates www.orangesonline.com, use a two-tier delivery system, shipping by truck to local post offices that then deliver directly to customers. "It gets there fresh, in a reasonable time," said Rick Del Greco, who owns Florida Fruit Shippers.
Last week his specialties included Vidalia onions and apricots. "They taste a thousand times better when you get them in season," he said.
Since I cannot remember the last time I ate an apricot that tasted like anything other than a cotton swab, I was tempted, even at $29.95 for three pounds (plus a $5 shipping charge).
But what I really craved were the familiar tastes of summer, like the tomatoes that Wickham's Fruit Farm grows out on the east end of Long Island, about an hour's drive from my house.
"When are those going to be ripe?" I asked Prudence Wickham Weston, one of the farm's partners.
"Believe it or not, we've got the first of our hothouse tomatoes coming in already, and the flavor is wonderful because we planted them in the field and put glass around them out there," she said.
"Why don't you send some of those to the groceries in Huntington?" I suggested helpfully.
"Possibly," she said. "Or we could ship them — they hold up pretty well."
I could see getting hooked. That's where Urban Organic comes in. The company's customers pay a one-time $25 registration fee for weekly delivery of boxes containing up to 18 kinds of fresh fruit and vegetables, ranging from $19.99 to $49.99 depending on weight.
For instance, the $39.99 box contains 30 to 35 pounds of produce, including such staples as a cooking green, a salad green, apples, oranges, carrots and bananas. In addition, the box contains eight seasonal items — the list is updated each week at the company's Web site — like strawberries, melons and mangoes.
Urban Organic, which is based in Brooklyn, makes weekly deliveries by truck in the New York metropolitan area, with fees ranging from nothing (in Manhattan and Brooklyn) to $4 (on Long Island and in western New Jersey, for example).
Orders are also shipped overnight via Federal Express, for additional charges, to other parts of the country. The company also operates
urbanorganicportland.com, which delivers orders by truck to customers in and around Portland, Ore.
Customers who will be out of town or who just get overwhelmed by the thought of one more bunch of chard can suspend delivery if they notify Urban Organic by 5 p.m. the previous day. "There's never a fee to stop or start up again," said Alex Moran, the company's produce manager. "And families that never eat a certain thing, like say red chard, can substitute something else."
With that much fresh produce, I wouldn't even need to grow my own. But those empty patches in the median might cause another commotion: I'd need those purple irises back. |
