Strawberries!

June 27, 2009

I think I’ve mentioned before that Alan and I are having a smoothie bar at our wedding reception in March. We love smoothies, and a large number of our friends don’t drink alcohol, so we thought this would be a nice treat for them, as well as a way to personalize our reception. If we bought all the produce and ingredients for the smoothies retail, this would be a costly measure, so we’re going to try and pick as much of the fruit as possible ourselves. My parents have a couple of huge freezers where we can store the fruit, and we live in the fruit belt of Ontario.

Strawberries are the first Ontario fruit of the season, and they are lovely. Mom called the other night and had picked some berries for the reception, and I was starting to feel like a big slacker. Since we moved to Hamilton, Alan and I haven’t really found any of the local fruit farms or farmer’s markets, and so I hit the internet to find a good you-pick in the area. I called around, and picked the place that was nicest to me over the phone. The farm I picked was Josmar Acres and they were lovely! They were well-organized and friendly, and the strawberries! They are so great! I was able to pick a flat of berries in a very short time.

It was a lovely morning. I left home around 8 am, and was home before 10:30. The farm was about half an hour away on the back roads, and I got to smell fresh-cut hay and see pretty farm land. When I got home, I washed and froze the berries on cookie trays and then transferred them to freezer bags. It only took a few hours, and maybe next weekend there will still be some berries to do up some more.

I remember strawberry picking in my childhood feeling like a chore. I’m not sure why any more.

Shannon Patterson, filed under Life, Projects | 1 Comment