Summer is here and – oh, wow, lucky you – so are the strawberries.
These are not your supermarket strawberries, woody, white-centered and trucked in from out of state.
They’re a local delicacy.
Deep red through and through, drippingly juicy, super sweet and a tiny bit tart, fresh local strawberries are bursting forth from local fields and roadside stands.
Their intense flavor and especially short season – typically three to four weeks once ripening begins in mid-June – make strawberries one of the freshest and most sought-after crops in Snohomish County.
While supermarket strawberries are for sale practically year-round, these babies won’t be around much longer – just until the Fourth of July or maybe a bit longer.
Talk about freshness.
Berries from Due’s Berry Farm, five miles north of Marysville, for example, are picked at 5 a.m., quickly packaged and sold the same day.
When they’re sold out, they’re sold out. Everything starts over at 5 the next morning.
“They’re straight from the fields, every single day,” said Becky Due, 41, who helps run the farm with her husband, Wayne Due, 41, and his parents, Clarence and Marge Due, 75 and 65.
How about flavor?
“Incredible,” said Becky Due, who loves to eat the berries fresh off the plants. “They’re the best-tasting berries, absolutely the best.”
Unlike berries trucked in from California, local strawberries are bred for flavor, not shelf life.
Due’s Berry Farm, for example, has grown Rainier and Shuksan varieties for decades.
When they come off the bushes, they’re perfect, beautiful and red and taste like candy, but they don’t stay that way very long.
They should be eaten fresh, frozen or turned into jam within a day or two.
“They’re old school, heritage varieties,” said Wayne Due. “That’s what my grandpa grew.”
The Dues’ local roots date back to 1910, when Clarence Due’s grandfather, Peter Due, settled in Snohomish County after coming to the United States from Denmark.
Snohomish County, though it isn’t so obvious today, sits in prime strawberry country.
In fact, there used to be more than 2,000 acres of the red rubies grown here, said Dianna Biringer with Biringer Farm north of Everett, where her family grows 20 acres of strawberries in addition to pumpkins and other crops.
But as farming has become more centralized and industrialized nationwide, strawberry production has declined dramatically in Snohomish County with fewer than 100 acres planted with strawberries.
Such shrinkage has made the fruits a cherished, and somewhat endangered, local treat.
Clarence Due started farming with his father, Paul, eventually growing peas and corn in addition to 50 acres of strawberries.
Today, the Dues grow only 10 acres of strawberries, as the crop has become less profitable and property taxes have soared.
In 2000, the Dues sold about 35 of their 90 acres to keep their business in the black and to allow Marge Due to retire from her 20-year career as a mail carrier, a job she took to save the farm.
Today, those acres are filled with homes and paved streets that all but surround the Dues’ barn and berry headquarters.
Despite the looming encroachment of urban life, Wayne Due is working to make sure at least some of his family’s strawberry fields will be around forever.
He worked for decades as an auto mechanic and custom car builder, but has recently come back to help carry on the family strawberry tradition.
Last spring, he planted his own two acres of strawberries, something he had seen his father do countless times.
It was a lot harder than he remembered.
“I can’t do it as good as he does,” he said of his father. “This is the first field I did myself.”
Though strawberries are one of the most difficult and expensive crops to grow, Wayne and Becky Due have been inspired by a growing interest in local food and farming.
“We’re so lucky. We’re getting this whole new way of thinking. People are willing to pay more for good food,” Wayne Due said, who works full time as head groundskeeper for the Lakewood School District. “Local is an important buzzword. People want local.”
Becky Due works as the farm’s sales and marketing guru in between her shifts at Gary’s Gutter Service in Marysville.
She’s been busy running farm stands and talking to area residents who are new to the area or others who may have forgotten about the farm.
“We are here. We’re still going,” she said. “We have the fifth generation coming up.”
Wayne and Becky Due’s two sons and two daughters, ages 18 to 14, all work for the berry operation in some capacity, in addition to the extended Due family, local school kids who pick for summer jobs as well as local Ukrainian pickers.
Because not everyone knows the difference between out-of-state and local berries, Wayne and Becky Due will break away from their busy schedules to do demonstrations and provide samples at Haggen Food and Pharmacy in Arlington, where their berries are selling fast.
It’s all part of the modern marketing needs of a small farmer, said Wayne Due, who has taken numerous classes in sustainable agriculture through Washington State University’s extension.
Strawberries are frequently listed on top-10 lists of what foods to buy organic because they are so heavily treated with chemicals when conventionally grown at large commercial farms.
The Dues’ berries aren’t certified organic, but they also aren’t anything like those of large conventional growers.
Every three years before starting a new crop, the Dues till natural fertilizer into the field in the fall. They spray plants with an FDA-approved weed-control solution only when the plants are dormant.
“It doesn’t even come near the berries,” Marge Due said, adding that when the plants start flowering and fruiting, they aren’t treated with anything but sun, rain and hand weeding.
Someday, Wayne and Becky Due might like to try for certified organic status. They want to raise other crops too, to meet the needs of an increasing number of people who want local food with serious flavor.
“This is what I really love to do,” Wayne Due said. “I want to do it, but is it possible?”
When Marge Due sees her son working the land, it seems like a good fit to her.
“You can tell when he’s on that tractor, he loves it,” she said. “It’s in his blood.”
Reporter Sarah Jackson: 425-339-3037 or sjackson@heraldnet.com.
Marge Due of Marysville, co-owner of Due’s Berry Farm, picked up this recipe from a friend in Eastern Washington.
She loves to serve it for a dessert on the Fourth of July, but it can also be served as a side dish or fruit salad.
“Some people use graham crackers, but the pretzels are way better,” she said of the key crust ingredient. “It also is very good with raspberries.”
Pretzel-strawberry delight
2cups crushed pretzels
3/4cup melted butter
3tablespoons sugar
16-ounce box of strawberry gelatin
2cups boiling water
210-ounce packages of frozen or fresh strawberries, slightly smashed and sweetened.
18-ounce container of cream cheese, room temperature
1cup sugar
1large container of Cool Whip
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix crushed pretzels, butter and 3 tablespoons sugar. Press the mixture into a 9-by-13-inch pan and bake for about 8 minutes.
Mix together gelatin, boiling water and strawberries. Refrigerate the mixture until it is partially but not completely jelled. Beat cream cheese with 1 cup sugar and stir in Cool Whip. Spread mixture onto cooled pretzel crust. Pour partially jelled strawberry mixture over Cool Whip layer and refrigerate for several hours or overnight.
Cut into squares and serve.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
