An e-mail has gone out the previous day: bring sun hats and sunscreen. The Fraser Valley forecast is “sizzling”. It's already warm at 9 on a Saturday morning when, in ones and twos, we meet up at Capers on West 4th Avenue with FarmFolk/CityFolk tour coordinator Tallulah Winkelman. Head count done with everyone settled in on the waiting bus, she hands out backgrounders that tell us B.C. has the highest percentage of female farm operators in Canada (35 percent) but that the average age of our province's farmers, at 56, exceeds the national median of 50. More than half of the province's 20,000 farms are operated by a single person; 45 percent of those do other non-farm work as well. Sixty-five percent of B.C. farms sell less than $25,000 annually. (The national figure is 37 percent.) We haven't even hit Boundary Road and it's already obvious that this is not just a sample 'n' sip gourmet safari.

Now in their third year, these Incredible Edible tours, held monthly through summer and fall, are an opportunity for deep culinary education on everything from heirloom poultry to environmental sustainability. This is a look at the frontline of all the regional, seasonal organic foods we see on menus and at farmers markets. That today's participants are eager for more than a day out in the country becomes obvious when Winkelman invites us to introduce ourselves.

One couple want to find out how to integrate local foods into their regular diet. Someone else is a “total city person who likes to eat well”. There's a self-described urban-guerrilla gardener and a person who works for Living Oceans Society (an organization concerned with marine biological diversity) keen to see firsthand the land-based equivalent. One attendee, on her third tour, is a veteran of Feast of Fields, the annual harvest festival that links growers and eaters. Along with her is a personal trainer keen to learn how the food system fits into overall health. An owner of a food store in Tofino wants to see what products are out there. Quite the mixed group, in fact, which promotes interesting en route discussion. We're busy dissecting the differences between certified organic, transitional, and natural foods when we reach the Fraser Valley's narrow bumpy side road that leads to the first of four places we'll visit today.

Glenwood Valley Farms in Langley grows cucumbers and peppers under glass. No herbicides, no pesticides, no soil—just lots of glass, 10 hectares of it, under which grow lots of cucumbers. Owners Tom Reinhart and Herb Schlacht point out how their operation has a very small footprint considering the quantity it produces. Inside, paths between the two-metre-tall plants with their yellow star-shaped flowers stretch to infinity. Instead of spraying plants, Reinhart explains, they rely on nature: battalions of bigger bugs that eat lesser bugs. (Insects have to be native to Canada and preferably to B.C.) The cukes—serious competition for Jack's beanstalks—were planted in their sawdust growing medium as 25-centimetre seedlings but have grown two metres tall in a month; make that a brisk 19 or 20 days in high summer. It's hot in here, so hot that the hissing sound of water cooling the glass overhead is met by an appreciative collective aah as the temperature immediately falls by about five degrees.

Reinhart talks about the rigorous greenhouse cleaning required each year and shows us the huge tanks used for mixing plant food. You can see tour participants beginning to register how much effort goes into producing the food they eat. In the boiler room, it's so noisy that we retreat outside to the edge of a pond and watch the ducks and geese as Reinhart describes how burning natural gas creates carbon dioxide for the veggies to inhale, and how the heat that results is conserved to keep them warm at night. “We're really environmentalists,” he says. “We want to preserve what God's given us here.” Nothing is wasted. Cukes that are less than straight are culled and donated to food banks and transition houses. The remainder are laser-sorted for length and packed into boxes. Invited to help ourselves, we leave with samples of cucumbers, both full-size and miniature, bright-coloured baby bell peppers, and a whack of information on greenhouse growing. Then we're back on the road.

To fit the bus down the unpaved track that leads to Two Bie Creek Farm, also in Langley, would be akin to squeezing a beer can through a keyhole, so we don our hats, grab water bottles, and saunter the short distance under dark-green trees to a garden dense with calendula and nasturtiums, their oranges and saffron yellows incandescent in the sun. Owners Brian and Barb McLellan bought the two hectares in 2002, logged a chunk of it, and now grow herbs and edible flowers, all organically. Barb is a herbalist who worked in doctors' offices, then made the decision to do what she really wanted, which was to grow the makings for edible bouquets and multicoloured petal mixes. She sells these at White Rock Farmers Market and at the farm. She also supplies a local restaurant and catering company, aptly named the Seasonal Experience, which in turn has supplied the box lunches for our group. Bread-and-butters prettied up with such mixtures as rose petals and lavender, or chives and tarragon, round out our salads of wild salmon and organic greens. (Nasturtium leaves and purslane are a couple of the lesser-known ones.) Lemon balm and fresh lemon juice make the lemonade that we ladle out of a vintage stone crock, and we finish with banana-and-fennel cake that, decorated with viola flowers, looks like a Victorian valentine.

Refreshed, we follow McLellan around her spread as she points out the feathery foliage of asparagus grown from seed and explains how companion planting keeps bugs away, not forgetting the 11 ducks that roam the garden knocking off slugs and beetles. We meet Isobel, a fluffy white chicken, and Montgomery, a rooster. (Later, some of us buy eggs in subtle shades of tawny and the delicate amber-turquoise that the sky turns just after sunset.) Out front, gravel paths thread between raised beds of golden oregano, rudbeckia, yarrow, and mint. “Feel free to sample anything,” says McLellan as we move toward the raspberry patch. Five seconds, plant to palate.

Back on the bus, we bowl along past barns, glossy horses, and fields of corn to our next stop, the Fort Wine Co. near Fort Langley. There, thinking of weekends to come, I grab brochures detailing self-guided farm tours around Chilliwack, Agassiz, and elsewhere (on-line at www.circlefarmtour.ca/). In the wine room, special-events coordinator Ted Bowman, impressively mustached and infectiously passionate about his work, describes how this former cranberry-growing operation now produces wine made from cranberries, both red and the early-harvest white, as well as other fruits. He explains the winery prefers organic fruit, and gives the trivia that cranberries were once called “red gold” because they briefly traded almost as high as gold. They may turn out a quarter-of-a-million bottles a year, but—Bowman indicates a test batch—that carboy of watermelon-and-strawberry is home-brewing size.

We're walked through the bottling process as we learn how and why screw caps are replacing corks, that an optical sensor ensures the straightness of bottle labels, and that China is a big importer of cranberry wine for health reasons. These aren't for cellaring, says Bowman: “Fruit wines are to be enjoyed now.” Say no more. We get into some serious sampling of the red-cranberry, white-cranberry, green-apple, strawberry, and the blissful brambly Wild West Blackberry Port, made with fruit from Haida Gwaii.

Clinking carry bags accompany both locals and out-of-towners back onto the bus that, by midafternoon, is taking us alongside the Fraser River toward 20-hectare Glen Valley Organic Farm cooperative. By now, the mercury has hit the mid-30s and more than one of us would like to spend serious time in the cooler where picked vegetables are held. There's not much produce in evidence today, as it's gone to various farmers markets, explains Alyson Chisholm, one of the owners. At Lonsdale Quay and White Rock markets it's sold by name; at others it comes under the umbrella of Langley Organics.

We see goats up close. We learn about the soil down near the river where vegetables grow in beds almost 150 metres long, and about the wildlife—deer, barn owls, plovers, coyotes, and eagles—around here. What are those tall sunflowerlike plants? Sunchokes. The grass beneath the orchard of 30 heirloom-apple varieties tickles our ankles. A yellow-green fruit is half-buried in it, a windfall. It's a Lodi, one of the first apple varieties of the season. We pass it around, biting into its warmth, the sweetness and flavour bringing home yet again that eating locally isn't just politically correct, it's deeply, pleasurably, sensual.

Visiting four different locations each time, FarmFolk/CityFolk Incredible Edible tours run this Sunday (August 20), September 23, and October 7, and cost $75 per person. For details, see www.ffcf.bc.ca/FarmTours.html.