We’ve done apples forever, and plan to do them again in a few weeks, I suppose.

Strawberries? I had picked those once, back before Yanni started Kindergarten, and Xay, at 2, was just the right height to pick all kinds of tiny white strawberries. . .

Cherries? During Xay’s potty training. Between the high ladder, the latrine, and the black fingers from pitting them, it was memorable.

But we’d never picked blueberries or peaches. This was the summer to remedy that.

We started out by returning to the strawberry fields of Mandingo Farm. We went with Julie and Tracie and their kids. The unusually wet spring had caused all the fruit to mature earlier this year, and we made it to the U-Pick place at the last possible week for strawberries.

You could tell. Most of the berries were mushy, disappointingly small, and overripe. Xay, having nightmare flashbacks to his corn detassling days of last summer, was ready to go almost as soon as we got there. Seven of us picked 11 pounds, which we brought home and refrigerated, cooked down, and froze. The strawberry cake that Sunday was heavenly.

The next fruit we harvested was cherries. Julie and the kids joined us at the cherry orchard. Cherries are my favorite of the group, but they are definitely the hardest to pick. The ripe, sweet cherries are at the top of the mature, tall trees, and those ladders are rickety. After a few times of climbing trees, reaching, hanging and jumping down, we had managed to pick 2 1/2 pounds. We brought the cherries home, pitted them, and froze them. We baked them in one dessert, but mostly ate them in cereal or plain.

After cherries, it was time to take on blueberries. I had heard so many people wax poetic about the ecstasy of picking blueberries. Xay’s Chinese teacher got really animated talking about how much better blueberry picking was than apple picking. She told me which farm was better for picking, and warned me against the huge commercial farm.

So we went to the farm she’d suggested, and met Annette and her girls there. The little office was shut tight, dark. There were some Mexican people fishing at this big watering hole in front of the blueberry bushes. We saw a sign from the huge commercial farm near the closed building.

Confused, we drove on to the huge commercial farm. In order to pick our own berries there, we had to buy a bucket for every 2 people in our group, at $18 a bucket. Ok, so we’d be picking for years to justify paying $72 for some blueberries. We decided to cut our losses and buy $10 worth of blueberries (5 lbs) at the gift shop. We also tried blueberry coffee, (fail) and jerky. uh, no.

The kids and I were upset about not getting to pick blueberries, but I was like, that’s the way it is–oh well. Then I got a phone call from Lisa, who had just gone blueberry picking with her daughter down the road from the big commercial farm. She gave us directions to Fritz’s farm, and we made a plan to go with Julie and Martha. Fritz’s was really nice, and easy going. We could use as many buckets as we wanted, at no extra cost, and were just charged by the pound of berries we ended up picking.

I could see why people are so into blueberry picking. There are just so many berries on the bushes! You are picking huge clusters of berries, and filling your bucket, and just feeling so productive. You can pick and pick and pick, and yet never feel like you’re picking the bush dry. You just move on because another ripe cluster has caught your eye. The berries were so big and juicy that everyone was eating while we picked. Chanya wanted to carry her own bucket, but it quickly got too heavy for her. We’d picked 9 pounds by the time the kids finally dragged me from the fields. We waited for Martha, and when she arrived, the girls helped her to pick 10 pounds or so. She called herself a blueberry picking fool. Martha had already been blueberry picking a couple times this summer, and was going for 30 pounds in her freezer. (She ended up going back to Fritz’s at least twice more).

We went blueberry picking in July. We still have blueberries in our freezer. Draw your own conclusions.

I was excited to find U-Pick peach farms in our area. When I found that the season ran from July to August, I took my time going out to pick them. Mistake. By the time we got out to the orchard last Friday, there was no more U-Pick peaches. We were a week too late. We bought some peaches, pears, corn, and grapes from the gift shop out there.

I was disappointed in the peaches. They were not ripe. They were good for cooking, but not for eating raw. The purple grapes were really sweet, and nobody liked the red grapes. My favorite food we bought there was corn. Now that would be a crop to pick. . .

Next up: apples. If we could figure out where to go. What’s your favorite u-pick food?