This is me at age nine sitting on my Grandma's deck with my big bucket of hand picked strawberries. Each summer when I was growing up I would be invited to spend a week- all by myself- at my Grandma's house (my sister got her own week too). The week would always consist of several of my favorite activities, one of which was berry picking. I have very vivid memories of the "clunk" the berries made as they hit the plastic ice cream pail interspersed with sweet strawberry juice running down my chin. One in the bucket, one in my belly. That pattern would continue well past the point of a tummy ache. I remember that inevitably the bugs and/or the heat would start to get to me and a part of me would want to stop. Yet another part of me, dreaming of the strawberry jam and other treats we would surely be making later, would relentlessly push on.
Today I took everyone strawberry picking. We do grow our own strawberries but between the deer and the fact that they are planted in the much neglected back gardens (at least since Nora has been born anyway) means that there's not much there to pick from. But knowing how exceptional home-grown-right-from-the-garden strawberries are has been giving us all an itch to get our hands on some.
We did our picking at this wonderful all organic berry farm (that we will be revisiting again for sure) not to far from us.
The kids were really good sports, despite the fact that it was really hot and buggy (just like I remember). It was however, hard to keep up with all the berry eating.
To keep us motivated we talked about all the things we would make with our berries, and we were all most inspired by the idea of strawberry shortcake and strawberry pie. Yes, tomorrow for sure.
In the end we left with 7 and a half pounds of strawberries. Although by the time we got home I'd say it was more like 6.
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