Strawberries taste sweeter when you pick them yourself
Mmm, strawberries. It’s that time of year. Are you craving the experience of plucking fresh strawberries right off the vine and tasting them, warm and sweet, right there in the dirt? Me too. And even if you don’t have a crop of your own (we tried planting a strawberry patch for the first time this year, but nothing promising has bloomed yet), there’s hope.
Of course, you can buy fresh berries at a local farmers’ market. But if you want the full experience, do what we did when I was a kid: go to a pick-your-own farm this spring and enjoy the fruits of somebody else’s labor. For a minimal fee, you can pick all the strawberries you want – and they’ll taste even sweeter after you’ve spent all morning bent over, lifting leaves and searching for the reddest, plumpest berries.
To find a pick-your-own farm near you, take a look at PIckYour Own.org. It’s a directory of pick-your-own farms in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other countries.
One word of advice: Because growing seasons are fickle, it’s a good idea to call ahead before visiting a u-pick farm. When I called the farm I’m planning to visit, they said strawberries are for sale in their farm market, but they haven’t opened the fields to pick-it-yourselfers yet. They’re waiting to see how well the crop does. Hopefully when I call back in a couple of weeks, the fields will be open for the pickin’.
Have you visited a pick-your-own farm? Any tips for making the most of it?
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Wish we had a pick-your-own farm around here (Outer Cape Cod)! There probably used to be such things but now all free real estate goes to development or belongs to the National Seashore.
That sounds delicious. I’m hoping ours will yield better next year!
There’s really nothing like homegrown! We used to have a strawberry patch in the backyard, and it was always the most amazing thing to pick berries in the late afternoon and eat them in the evening. Delicious. Thanks for the reminder.
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Sounds like fun, Debi! And a perfect Mother’s Day activity. I hope we’ll get to go soon too.
We’re heading off to go strawberry picking in Northern California this weekend for Mother’s Day. What a treat! Usually, we pick at Underwood Family Farms in Moorpark, Ca. Always a hit with the kids! Gotta let ‘em munch on a few while they pick, of course!