Picking strawberries

On Saturday we went to a small farm about an hour south to pick strawberries. It was such a small operation that it sort of felt like going over to someone's house to pick berries. And pet their pig Copper and their chickens, which we did too.

The farmer was very welcoming and happy to talk about how everything works. These strawberries are grown in pots stacked vertically about 5 high, which was a welcome improvement from my image of us spending our morning hunched over row after row of earthbound strawberry plants. The strawberries are actually grown hydroponically though I didn't know that until well after we had left because it looks like they are growing in soil. The farmer asked us to use scissors to harvest only the reddest ripest berries. Emerson loved finding berries in the low pots and snipping them off with the scissors and a little help. Only once did he take off running while holding the scissors prompting the parental observation from Eric: "He's running with scissors."

The strawberries above, minus a few that got eaten along the way, turned into this much jam (plus another jar we gave away before I took this picture):