The latest list of ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ vegetables is out, compiled by the Environmental Working Group. At the top of the dirty list are apples, strawberries, grapes and celery. The fruits make sense, especially strawberries. If you’ve ever grown them yourself, you know they are highly perishable. To get them to market, conventional growers spray them with a cocktail of insecticides and fungicides. Yum, just what I want to eat…NOT!
To come up with the list, scientists tested 48 popular fruits and vegetables for pesticide residues. It’s not all bad news though. Avocados, sweet corn and pineapples are some of the cleanest fruits and veggies on the list. Knowing what’s likely to be full of chemicals can help consumers make wiser choices about when to choose organic. And for gardeners, it can help in the decision of what to grow.
Growing your own food is a great way to know exactly what chemicals have been used on them, if any. I’m happy to be having some of our organically grown, never sprayed blueberries for breakfast this morning. They are from our 2013 crop, carefully harvested and frozen for our later use.
frozen blueberries from last year
You can read the entire article here at Rodale News.
Apples always come out on the top or close to the top of the list of dirty. And organically grown ones tend to be bad too. They still get sprayed a lot. And I love apples. I wish I had room for more apples trees in the yard. When I buy fruit in bulk I tend to get it from the farmer’s market and use the sellers that do IPM (Integrated Pest Management) methods. The strawberries from the farm I buy from are sprayed before the plants flower, but they don’t spray at all once it blooms. So they are pretty safe strawberries. So if you can’t grow your own it helps to know how they are grown.
It is great that you have a good source for strawberries. I think getting local strawberries is a good strategy even if they are conventionally grown. They don’t have to be treated to survive shipping and storage. Plus they are more likely to be picked when ripe, which means they will taste better.
Growing your own is really the only way to guarantee anything anymore…I need a bigger plot to plant in 🙂