strawberry picking

On the first day of summer vacation we went to a u-pick farm to stock up on fresh, delicious strawberries! I'm actually surprised there were as many ripe ones as there were...considering the not so wonderful weather we've been having here. We picked a lot of strawberries with some friends of ours. I'll probably need to go again to get more to make jam. Interestingly, this year we also planted a few strawberry plants at home and they have turned out soooo delicious. Way better than anything we picked or tasted at the farm! Hooray for homegrown food!

a fruitful season

One of my favorite times of year is the beginning of summertime - when it's ripe for strawberry picking! I have really fond memories of heading to the strawberry patch in Oregon with my mom and siblings when I was really young to pick strawberries. We'd eat more than would make it into our buckets! I could live on strawberries...strawberries and bread. Yum. We picked buckets and buckets of strawberries this year. With our first batch I made some strawberry jam to give to others and strawberry shortcake to eat. Unfortunately we picked most of our strawberries the day before we left for our vacation...and I wasn't organized enough to get them washed and frozen before we left. So, unfortunately, lots of strawberries went to waste. A tragedy!

My little helper.

Picking and weighing the berries.