Sometimes things go wrong

I got home from work last night and started the canner to finish canning my year’s worth of dilly beans.

Normal Monday night at the King household. Just us and the dilly beans.

We need to get a life.

Bubba asked if I’d heard about the ecoli breakout at a local berry farm. I hadn’t yet, so he proceeded to tell me about the unfortunate situation with their strawberry crop. You can find the article on the daily Oregonian this morning, but I’m not going to link to it here for you because it’s just a bum deal that doesn’t need to go farther than it has.

So why do I bring it up here? Well, even those farmers with the best of intentions sometimes get the rotten end of the deal. We can coddle our crops and our animals only so much but at the end of the day if a deer comes into the field, poops on the fruit, someone gets sick and God forbid die- the farmer hangs his head low and kicks the dirt.

I’m sure the farm feels awful, if not devastated for those that got sick or worse- let alone horrified that anyone should be worried about purchasing the crops that they’ve toiled over.

So how do they recover? Well I’m not sure of the logistics but I’m guessing the farm will have to pay obscene amounts of money for damages, fees and fines and then testing for next year. All this in hopes that the deer doesn’t make a second appearance. And also so people will feel protected and secure about buying from them again.

Which we should. They are our community members who work very hard to deliver the best product possible and sometimes things just go wrong, even under the closest watch and with the best of intentions. To the farm: If you need help next year watching your fields for deer- call us. Bubba and I will happy stand guard with shotgun in hand…in exchange for a few berries.

Note* If you participated in the Strawberry Jam class this year, you didn’t purchase these berries (they weren’t ready yet when we did the class). Additionally, if you read the fine print in the news articles it says that if you have eaten the farm’s berries but haven’t gotten sick within 10 days, there’s no need to be concerned as the bacteria’s incubation period is 2-7 days.