Strawberry Fields

Saturday was the most perfect of late spring mornings. After a week of gray, dreary days we awoke to bright sun, blue skies, and warm temperatures. It was the perfect day for picking strawberries! It took some prodding to get the dudely to agree that strawberry picking so early in the morning (before 9am, gasp!) was a good idea, but he eventually agreed.

We ended up at Tougas Family Farm where we were greeted with the nicest staff of people. It was so well organized. We ended up with our own row to pick from, a bucket for rotten berries, our picking tray, and a flag to indicate where we’d stopped.

The picking was easy! After so much rain the berries were begging to be picked. We only went about 6 feet in our row and ended up with 17 pounds of berries in a mere 30minutes. I’d gone with the hope of gathering 10 pounds of berries and was shocked when we arrived at the scale with nearly double that amount.

What to do with all those berries? Freezer jam. It was the sole driver in my wanting to go strawberry picking. I remember my mom making it years ago when we were kids and I loved it. I had to try my hand at it. It was so easy; I just followed the directions inside the box of Sure-Jell. I ended up with 8 – 16 ounce jars of jam. It’s about all the space I could afford to give up in my little freezer. But believe me I could have kept going because there were many, many strawberries left.

They didn’t last long though. We munched through about 2 pounds of fresh berries, froze a bunch of whole berries for later, made a fresh strawberry pie, imbibed in fresh strawberry daiquiris, and made strawberry cheesecake ice cream. And now they are gone and I’m wondering if it would be gluttony to go back and pick more.