We "rented" two baby chicks again this year, from J&M Farms at Eastern Market. Johnny and Joey were busy with a lot more chicks this year, and the program has become quite a success. We're looking forward to the eggs "Cheep Cheep" and "Beep Beep" will make for us later this year.

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As we were driving across the back roads of Vermont, we came across this lovely little 180-year-old farm [Taylor Farm, Londonderry, VT]. The farmer said we could go wherever we wanted on the farm and handed us a bunch of slop to feed to the pigs. After wandering around for half an hour or so, when we were loading a few vats of maple syrup into our car, two goats climbed into the front seat (you can see one of them by the tractor). The incident almost provided enough laughs to get us to New York without whining.

 

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Last week we went picking tart cherries in rural Lenawee County, Michigan with my mom, my sister, and her kids. My mom grew up down there. I guess tart cherries aren't very common for u-pick around the country, but Michigan is all about cherries this time of year. I grew up with a sweet cherry tree in my backyard, but I had never picked tart ones before, and was shocked to see how bright they were filling the trees. They looked like slot machine cherries. Like Pac-Man cherries:

It wasn't as easy for the kids to help, but the girl is super into u-picking these days so she found a way to climb the trees and managed a sizable haul of about three pounds.

The boy was a little frustrated he couldn't climb as well as his sister, but he managed to pick plenty on branchs that had fallen where fruit still grew. It didn't really matter because anything he picked either ended up in his belly or on the ground

He did love the cherry pitting machine back at the checkout. Cherries were 60 cents a pound unpitted, 85 cents a pound pitted. We picked fourteen pounds and opted to pay the extra couple bucks to get them pitted:

It was totally worth it, not only to watch them go through the machine. . .

But also to get home, wash them, and just throw them right into the pot to make jam. This was about half of what we picked:

It boiled down to about six pints of jam, and it set really nicely. I added a little bit of cinnamon and nutmeg with the sugar, and in the end it still tastes a little tart but as sweet and delicious as a cherry pie.

As you can tell, we are really into picking berries and canning this year, probably because we are also really into peanut butter and jam sandwiches and there's such a sense of accomplishment to look at all those cans and know that the jam on your sandwich came from fruit you picked. We don't mind driving a ways to find a remote farm, and have decided to avoid any of those u-pick farms with all the amenities like petting zoos, corn mazes, and playgrounds. It seems like the further you go out, the cheaper the fruit is by the pound. Besides, who needs zoos, mazes, or jungle gyms when you can climb all over an old tractor?

Next up: gooseberries, red and black currants, raspberries and blueberries.

 

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Word is out that this year there is a bumper crop of strawberries here in Michigan, and there's nothing quite like a freshly-picked organic strawberry to make those gargantuan atrocities grown in California greenhouses and trucked across the heartland taste as disappointing as they truly are. The kids and I hit the highway the other day to spend the morning picking strawberries out in the countryside west of town.

The boy did his job and ate everything he picked (and only a little of what we picked), while the girl (who has proven pretty useless on u-pick outings in the past) filled up her 4-quart basket rather quickly. She's on a bit of a ethical kick lately and insisted it was wrong to eat strawberries without paying for them. I insisted that was the best part of laboring in the hot sun and paying for the privilege of doing what Mexican migrant workers do every day just to feed their families.


Like every wise agritourism business, the farm charged more for the strawberries we picked than we would have paid for them at the market. But they had a bunch of miniature horses, goats, and chickens to make it worth our while. 


This was her favorite strawberry that she picked, shaped like a perfect heart. 


Here are the five quarts of strawberries we picked that morning. 


And here are the five jars of strawberry jam we made when we got home. It was our first effort canning, and we enjoyed it so much that we're planning to make jam from every kind of berry that ripens this summer so that we can enjoy the fruit we pick on our pancakes next winter. (We didn't use all five quarts for the jam; we're saving some to make a second batch of jam with some rhubarb we'll pick up at the market this weekend).

I'm already investigating u-pick blackberry, raspberry, blueberry and other fruit farms for other day trips this summer.

I've been documenting some of our daily adventures here for a few months now, and the good folks behind the new Dodge Caravan recently contacted us about sponsoring some of posts by buying the ads you see around them (full disclosure: they did not provide any vehicles or compensate us for any costs involved). Check out the links to learn more about the new Dodge Caravan with its spacious interior (room for more berries!) and enough multimedia options to keep the kids from whining on trips to the country no matter how long or short (something I definitely feel like I could use sometimes).

 

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Two weeks ago we picked up two baby chicks at the farmer's market, making an agreement with the farmer that we would return them in two weeks and he would give us some of the eggs they'd lay later in the year. When we picked them up they looked like this:

The girl slept with the chicks in their container at the foot of her bed every night, chirping away; they even came with us on a drive across the state (they spent the journey westward in the trunk, on the eastbound leg they rode on my wife's lap). The other day, before we brought them back to the farmer, we let them walk around the neighborhood and it was hard to believe they had grown so much:

It was a difficult thing to load them up in the dog wagon and bring them up to the market. The girl promised them she would eat all their eggs.

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