The Significance of Strawberries.
I could not buy strawberry
plants in March of 2020.
I simply could not find
them in any local hardware store. With the COVID shut-downs newly in place, I was
definitely not comfortable dragging my three children (my oldest unexpectedly out
of school) the hour down to Bakersfield just for the sake of entering Lowes to
buy strawberries. These were the weeks where I only left the house for grocery
shopping at 6AM- and we were supposed to stay home for 2 weeks to “slow the
spread.”
Other people were worried
about toilet paper and meat, but I was saddened by the lack of strawberry plants.
This may or may not have been because of COVID- it might have simply been a bad
year for strawberries.
In May, we suddenly found it impossible to buy appliances
online. Our 15-year-old dryer gave out, and no big-box stores would ship a new
one to our house.
We line-dried our clothes
and I (using You-Tube Videos and Amazon replacement parts) fixed the old drier instead of just buying a new one. It worked for
about three months before it broke again.
In October, when we had saved
up to buy a new Lazy-Boy Sleeper couch for our spare room, the salespeople at
the furniture store in Ridgecrest told me that the waiting list for Lazy-Boy
furniture was about 6 months long, and even then, there would be no guarantees.
I ended up buying a different sleeper couch
that they already had in stock. It may not have been what I planned to buy, but
I was glad to get it.
Strawberry plants. Whirlpool
Driers. Lazy-Boy Couches. These things are not needs, but I still found my
inability to buy them unsettling, as if the foundation of society was showing its
cracks.
This March, I decided to
try again with the strawberries. Imagine my delight when I walked into True-Value
and saw an entire rack taller than me full of young, beautiful strawberry plants. I bought 3
pallets.
We did eventually find a
whirlpool drier through The Appliance Center, a small appliance store in Lake Isabella, where they were magically able to
find us one when Lowes and Home Depot could not.
I’m just grateful my strawberry planter is finally full.
Dear Sandy:
ReplyDeleteOnce a month, Jackie and I embark upon a 45-minute drive from our Lambeth home to Parks Blueberries, near Bothwell, Ontario.
Now then: Parks' berries are legendary for their quality.
They grow their blueberries in acre upon acre of patches; then they flash-freeze them.....
So when we, the customers, purchase them, we simply store them in our freezer until we need them.
Park's flash-frozen blueberries are the core ingredient in each and every whey protein shake that I craft in our Vitamix blender.
I then pour the blended shake into a hard plastic bottle, drinking it at the halfway point of my evening 30-mile-plus, 2-hour-plus bicycle ride.
But now, lo & behold, Parks has raised the ante.
They are now cultivating STRAWBERRIES year-round in their greenhouses, and selling them in their onsite store.
And I gotta tell ya, their delicious oversized strawberries add SUCH an flavour-full element to my protein shakes.
And no, I have never undertaken to grow my own strawberries or blueberries.
But then again, Parks Blueberries - a family-owned-&-operated business - wouldn't exist, I daresay, if everyone DID cultivate and maintain their own patches.
As for the acute appliance shortage that has become such a raging reality during this pandemic.....
Well, you were wise to seek out a private merchant.
That's what we did when our refrigerator gave up the ghost.
All the franchises were sold out.
But Don Brown Appliances, just a Paul Bunyan's stone throw away from where we reside, kindly sold us their floor model of a state-of-the-art Maytag fridge, complete with an ice-making machine.
The owner himself delivered the fridge and installed it in our home.
So now we can store our flash-frozen Parks blueberries in the fridge's freezer.
As for our Parks strawberries, there is plenty of room in the same fridge, in the humidity-controlled fruit crisper.
How satisfying it is to see private merchants flourishing.....
Independent business entrepreneurs and owners who rise to the challenges that confront us when such a pandemic rears its ugly head.
And isn't it wonderful to interact with them, knowing that they are under no compulsion to tow the corporate line?
My two cents' worth,
PhiL >^•_•^<
Thank you for sharing, Philip! Parks Blueberries sounds amazing! What an enjoyable family trip. It's fun to grow your own strawberries, especially with small children around because they love hunting down the little red berries, but I'm not particularly good at growing them- since I posted this, I'm down to about 18 plants from the original 25 I planted. Hopefully I'll be able to buy more next year. They do propagate by sending out runners, but mine don't seem to do it very quickly.
DeleteI also hope many private merchants have benefitted from having resources available that the "big box" stores do not. I'm glad you found a fridge- those have been in short supply, too!