I second Birdsong’s ode to strawberries. ‘Tis the season indeed.
In Davis there’s a small organic u-pick strawberry field at Pacific Star Farm. It’s about 10 minutes from my house on a old county road. We arrived late on Memorial Day. It was hot. The field radiated a strawberry smell that – how can I say this – enveloped us. It was like we wandered into a warm strawberry cloud. Heaven.
As I said the farm is organic, so it’s safe for me and my toddler. She “helps me”: takes strawberries out of my bucket, stares at them with wonder and awe, sticks her finger in them as far as it will go, then throws them on the ground. She doesn’t want to eat them (ever since my husband snuck sardines in her rice, she’s rightfully suspicious of new food), but I suspect that next year she’ll be stuffing her mouth.
We were the only ones there, so I let her run up and down the rows after she was done playing with the fruit. The plants are full of berries and it only took me a few minutes to fill a big bucket. The farm was quiet except for a small tractor driven by a guy who waved to us.
My back hurt later that day and I wonder how on earth people harvest fruit for a living. What difficult, tiring work it is. I can't imagine characterizing it as "unskilled."
For those of us brought up on supermarket-shipped-big-bland strawberries, ripe organic strawberries are a revelation. And they go bad so quickly! We made strawberry ice-cream with local cream, milk, eggs and non-local sugar. I mixed them into my daughter’s oatmeal. We ate strawberries with yogurt for breakfast. I decided to make up a batch of strawberry jam with the rest. The jam didn’t set, so I have several small jars of strawberry syrup. Just the thing for pancakes and waffles this weekend. I didn’t think of freezing them, but that’s what I’ll do with the bucket we’re going to pick tomorrow.
I'm not sure if Pacific Star makes a lot on the strawberries. They seemed pretty relaxed about the operation. In response to my email query about hours, they let me know it was a 24/7 operation and I was free to come pick fruit any time and leave money on the table. Luckily it was clear they weren't relying solely on fruit. They were growing lots of other things in the nearby fields.
When I was little I remember my mom picked up a pint of supermarket strawberries and quickly put them down, commenting on how expensive they were. Expensive?! Even at 8 years old, I wondered how someone could pass spending a few dollars for such a treat. Today, a pint of real strawberries picked fresh from the fields is less than a St**buck’s latte, a couple gallons of gas or a dry-cleaned shirt. And picking them with your daughter on a warm spring day? I’ll say it again. Heaven. Pure heaven.
Suzanne eats all sorts of food grown around Davis, CA and talks about it on adjectivenoun.com.
