a berry good time

Filed Under Places, Tips & Tricks | July 11, 2011

With strawberry season coming to a close and the raspberries (almost) ripe, it’s a perfect time to head out on a berry picking adventure with your kids. It’s our type of outing: little prep and big rewards. Here’s our berry checklist for a perfect picking experience:

  • Call before going to the farm to check availability and picking conditions.  Only so many berries ripen at a time, so once rows have been picked over a farm will often close them until the next day. For this reason, and to beat the heat, it’s a good idea to head out early.
  • Come prepared with water, sunscreen, hats, and snacks. And to quote our 5-year-old, “Prepare to get messy!” The berry patch is no place for party clothes.
  • Flat containers give your berries the best chance of getting home before they’re turned into jam but are difficult to carry. We bring small picking containers (yoghurt pots with strings to hang around the shoulders for the kids, and ice cream pails for us), which we empty into larger flats (cardboard beer flats from the liquor store are perfect) when full. That’s why we love the farms that provide wagons for hauling our berry loot.
  • Before you go, decide how to address the ‘To eat or not to eat’ dilemma. Some u-picks request that pickers not eat while they are picking. We get that; farming is a tenuous livelihood and they can’t afford to have hundreds of people a day eating their stock for free. But it is cruel and unusual punishment to take kids berry picking and expect them to refrain. We tend to turn a blind eye to their nibbles, and then ‘fess up at the till and ask them to charge us for an additional kid-sized container.

So what do we do with our bounty? Well, it’s all-you-can-eat for the next 48 hours: Think smoothies, with ice cream, and au naturel. We also jam it up – check out our blog for a strawberry freezer jam that is safe to make with the kids, cook up compotes, and freeze berries in serving sized Ziploc bags for pancake breakfasts throughout the year. And finally, with raspberries, blackberries and such, we freeze a couple of cookie trays full of evenly spread berries. Once frozen, they too can go in bags. Then when spread out to thaw, you get a fairly intact berry to eat or adorn a cake – a nice treat in the middle of winter.

If you like adventures of discovery, head out (from Toronto, try Niagara bound or northwest towards Halton Hills, and in Vancouver, try Steveston or Langley) and look for U-pick signs.
But if you want to plan ahead, here are a few of our favourites:

Vancouver:

Toronto:

 

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