DATE: Sunday, April 27, 1997                TAG: 9704270162

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL

                                            LENGTH:   49 lines

TOPSY-TURVY SPRINGTIME BRINGS EARLY STRAWBERRIES

You're not going to believe this at first, but people are already picking strawberries in the fields hereabouts in Virginia and North Carolina.

Farmers say the berries are large and sweet and the crop will be plentiful, given some warm weather with just a little rain now and then.

That is not too much to ask of the Lord, you'd think.

The season sneaked up on us a week to 12 days ahead of time.

Asked why that had occurred, Barbara Henley said: ``April was in February and February is in April.''

It took me a minute or so to figure out that Delphic utterance, but she's right. We had warm weather in February and now in April a stretch of devilish cold, wet days. The season stood on its head.

The strawberries' arrival escaped my notice because it seemed spring had passed us by. Then Judy Paton of Virginia Beach inquired Saturday when strawberry season would begin. That woke me up.

I resent missing even a day of eating strawberries - well, that regret applies as well to May peas, butterbeans, lettuce, radishes, red potatoes, corn, blueberries, figs, cantaloupes, watermelons, peaches, scuppernongs and all else that grows in this Eden of Hampton Roads and coastal North Carolina.

Henley Farm opened Thursday its pick-your-own fields on Charity Neck Road in Pungo.

Sweet Charity strawberries came first, to be joined this week by the Chandler kind. Henley noted that planting berries on plastic keeps the soil warm and helps account for an early season.

At Hickory Ridge Farm in Chesapeake on South Battlefield Boulevard near the Carolina line, Frankie Sweetwood reported that picking had just begun on the farm operated by three families. ``It's our first year on plastic,'' she said, ``and the strawberries are large and plentiful.''

During the week her sister, Loretta Jenkins, will be at the phone.

At Greene's Farm in Suffolk just off Holland Road, Mary Greene observed that the strawberries, which usually start the first week in May, are a little bit early, but it's a real nice crop.

At Brumsey's Farm in Currituck on Route 168, 14 miles south of the Virginia line, Edward Brumsey noted that although strawberries had ripened earlier, rain had delayed until Friday the opening of the farm to pickers.

The season was getting under way at about the normal time and it would be a good year, he said, but people of late have not been picking their own berries as much as they used to do.

Well, we must rally and turn out in the fields. The more we eat the more the farmers will plant. Keep an eye on Good Things to Eat in the classified ads as the season turns.

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