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Ground Cherries


Smokefree

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I had heard of these through my internet gardening groups but never thought I would have a chance this year to try them. Last saturday at the DuBois farmer's market Muth's had them and they are so tasty! They are about the size of a small grape and are encased in a papery light grey cover. They are a vegetable but are so sweet and it is impossible to describe it. I definetly want some more this next weekend.

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we try anything, if you sell them we will try them......need to do anything special?

Nope, they grow like weeds. Actually they are a member of the sunflower family. You eat the tubers which taste a bit like sunflower seeds. The tubers are excellent for diabetics because they contain, inulin, a sugar that diabetics handle well.

The tubers don't store  when dug but they can be kept in the ground all winter and will come up again in the spring. I have a great recipe for Jerusalem artichoke pie from a book by Euell Gibbon. I make it once a year when I dig the tubers.  

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On the news yesterday, there was something about cherry farmers having to let their crops rot and be wasted because of some new Government regulation.

 

That makes a lot of sense.  :-/

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On the news yesterday, there was something about cherry farmers having to let their crops rot and be wasted because of some new Government regulation.

 

That makes a lot of sense.  :-/

 

Guess there was a glut of sour cherries. Enough to get the prices so far down that price controls kicked in. Sounds very similar to the price controls we have on milk in PA. Farmers have never had it easy. Are price controls on farm products good or bad?

 

"Tart cherry glut brings low price, crop dump order

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

OLD MISSION, Mich. -- Michigan tart cherry growers say they're preparing to let up to a quarter of this year's bumper crop rot on the ground under a federal marketing order, and some say they'll shift into more profitable wine grape production.

The order will divert 42 percent of the nation's about 300 million-pound tart cherry harvest from the primary domestic market this year.

Growers in the Grand Traverse Bay area estimate they'll abandon 20 to 25 percent of their crop.

Some producers are unhappy about the dumping, and Leonard Lion made his feelings known by dumping his 72,000 pounds of diverted cherries along Old Mission Road in Grand Traverse County's Peninsula Township.

"All I'm saying to the tourists and joggers and others in this town is that life on the farm is not always profitable, and we're losing our producers," he told the Traverse City Record-Eagle.

Michigan grows most of the nation's tart cherries, with production concentrated in the northwestern Lower Peninsula.

New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin are the other major producing states.

Tart cherries - also called sour, red or pie cherries - are best known as ingredients in desserts and drinks. Nearly all tart cherries are frozen, canned or dried.

Growers say they expect to receive about 20 cents a pound this year, down from about 40 cents a pound last year.

"You have to match supply with demand in the domestic industry ... or the market price drops to about zero," said Perry Heeding, executive director of the Cherry Industry Administrative Board in Dewitt that sets the market restrictions.

Lion said he is moving out of the tart cherry business as fast as he can and planting wine grapes instead. Others in the Old Mission Peninsula are doing the same. "The further I get away from the tart cherry business the better as far as I'm concerned," said cherry grower and Peninsula Township Supervisor Rob Manifold. "My whole focus right now is to convert to wine grapes."

---

Information from: Traverse City Record-Eagle, http://www.record-eagle.com"

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