One of the projects we've been working on is a secret strawberry patch we planted a month ago on a vacant lot near our house. While it was a lot of fun, the yield wasn't enough to create jam so we headed out to the country to pick a few (um, 15) pounds of strawberries. I wore my old-timeyest outfit for the occasion:

The best part was having my wife there, after last summer's adventures picking with both kids and just me to supervise.

And after a long Sunday night over a hot stove, we have enough strawberry jam for a year's worth of PB&Js.

 

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School trip. Hay ride. U-pick. 10lbs of golden delicious, 5 gala. Hay bales. Two bee stings. Three doughnuts on site (and a dozen to go). One gallon of cider. Applesauce and pie this weekend.

 

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We were blueberry picking the other day and I turned my back for a minute and heard the sound of far more fun than can ever be had picking blueberries. They had, of course, found mud.

It obviously could have been a lot worse. They could have been up to their waists in it. They could have disappeared into the bog, only to be discovered twelve centuries later, with alien archaeologists determining they were creatures who subsisted on a diet entirely of blueberries. Who, you might ask, lets his son wear a white t-shirt while blueberry picking? Apparently I do. 


The only casualties were their shoes, which I had to reach in and slurp out of where they were lodged deep inside the mud. Gross.


Once we got back to picking, we managed a sixteen-pound haul. At $1.60 a pound, that was a lot of blueberries for not a lot of money. The kids were particularly sweet about sharing blueberries with each other as we picked:


And they ate liberally from my buckets as we went along. 


At home,we made about ten more jars of blueberry jam, and about ten jars of blueberries preserved whole in a simple syrup (which we'll use for pancakes all winter). The rest we ate right out of the refrigerator until they were gone.

 

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Blueberries are our #1 fruit around here; half of my son's daily caloric intake probably comes from blueberries in some form or another: blueberry yogurt, blueberry pancakes, blueberry muffins, blueberry juice, or blueberries themselves. This is the first year he's really capable of picking them himself so we've been looking forward to our annual trip over to Washtenaw County's blueberry fields for many months. Unfortunately, it took him forever to figure out how to pick blue ones and leave the green ones. The face above is the one he made every time he bit into a green berry.

Every taste of green berry sent him over to me to beg for a nice deep blue one.

And I'd oblige. . .

And he'd stand in the middle of a bush full of ripe berries until he was ready to beg for some more.

The girl, however, is becoming a real pro. Last year she contributed nothing to the daily haul, but this year after we picked for a few minutes I glanced into her bucket and actually saw berries accumulating:

She picked 3.5 pounds in less than an hour! And she was pretty proud while she helped make those berries that started their day on the bush finish their day preserved in jars on our shelf.

 

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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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