Retired grower revisits WWII fruit growing

KAPELLE – A museum dedicated to the fruit growing culture in the province of Zeeland recently held a one-evening session on fruit growing as experienced during WWII. Among other things, it presented a retired grower who enlightened people about the complexities of growing fruit during the war years, about the imposed government regulations, and the restrictions growers and processors faced as well as the art of home-based canning, now largely lost. He also demonstrated that canning process. Surprising to many perhaps, Zeeland was already a fruit-growing region during the Roman occupation about two thousand years ago.