Berries

Alternatively titled: Thank goodness I'm not a migrant worker

Saturday I took my 5 year old, my mother in law and myself to a Pick Your Own strawberry farm about 30-45 minutes from our house.

The berries were, of course, pick your own and $2.60 a pound.

I spent about an hour and a half out there picking, with help of course, and can't help but think, what a very middle class thing to be doing. To be paying for the privilege of picking my own berries when out in the world, the strawberries in my grocery store could very well (and probably were) picked by Mexican migrant workers.

My back ached and I got sunburned and I was only out there for 90 minutes max. I was hot, sweaty and at the end a little light headed. I honestly said, out loud, "Thank God I don't have to do that for a living."

While we were out there we did meet a toadally sweet Toad who was working very hard in the fields as well catching bugs.



The place we went was certified organic which I didn't know until we were there. It was nice but I gotta say, it looks like they need more toads. A lot of the berries had been dined on by bugs and so it was a lot harder to pick than I initially anticipated.

The berries were small, much smaller than what you get at your local grocery store and that of course was expected.

In the end our 90 minutes of not so much constant picking yielded about 4 lbs of strawberries.


More importantly we had a good time and at least for me, it really highlighted how much work we DON'T do to provide the food that we consume.

I'll detail later what I did with the strawberries because I'm pretty proud of it both because I picked the berries by hand and also because it was my first experiment.