Berry Picking

Oops, sorry. One more thing from June, but because of all the pictures it needed it's own post.

Fruit picking. It's one of the coolest things ever. Paul and Maggie must have been out of town (windsurfing), but we wanted to hang out with Luke and Tiffany. We thought we'd go pick some berries, but it turned out most of the berries weren't in season on those farms. But we found some other fruit to pick, so we drove out there anyway. Brentwood, I think. It's a town full of u-pick places. It was awesome! We just drove down this one road and drove by sign after sign advertising the fruit to pick. We ended up stopping at a place we had researched, but also drove by a strawberry place (which was by happenstance, but wonderful). The fruit was so good. My mouth waters just thinking about it. And we often think ripe is what we get in the store!

Here are Luke and Z picking some strawberries. They were so good (get used to me saying that). And of course we had to taste them to make sure we were picking ripe ones! Z liked tagging around with Luke and looking for red strawberries.

It doesn't hurt when there's a tractor to look at, either.
There were a few times when Z would just pick up a strawberry and eat it without me noticing right away. One time he downed the whole thing, leaves and all! He thought they were pretty good.

Luke and Tiffany searching.

After buying several pounds of strawberries (I think they were only $1.25/lb) and managing to escape the port-a-potty with some serious sanitizer, we headed onward in our journey.
We stopped at this one orchard that had peaches, apricots and nectarines. It was SO hot that day, so J and I waited in the car with Z next to the air conditioning for a few minutes. We didn't want him to get too hot. But the shade of the trees made it much more bearable than the strawberry patch. We didn't want him to end up with heat rash again.

As J and I had never picked these fruits before (not sure about Luke and Tiffany), we asked the people about signs of ripeness. One guy told us to pick one, eat it, and if it tasted good and juice ran everywhere, it was probably pretty ripe. He wasn't joking. We had to eat these things leaning over because of all the juice. And the apricots could just be broken in half. They were so good.

Here's J and Z playing in the trees.



Like I said, Zach loved hanging out with Luke. They got to go searching for some good fruit (which was not in short supply).



Luke and Tiffany looking for some good ones. This fruit cost 2 bucks a pound, but we had to buy at least 5 pounds, I think. I was actually worried!!

They found one. They were so ripe it didn't take much to pluck them off the tree. And I learned that the color variation (at least with these) was because of the shadow of the leaves. It must make a different chemical reaction with the sugar. But where a leaf was right up against the fruit, it would be lighter.

Success! We had to really watch our step - there was fruit everywhere. We also got to play on ladders. Zach liked playing on the support pole.

And into the un-ending box of fruit. We came away with so much, but Luke and Tiffany got much more.

Try as I might, it's actually hard to get a good pic like this.

So here's our haul. Then we stopped at a stand and got some corn for dinner. I figured we had close to 70 pounds of fruit in our trunk. It smelled crazy good!
One random note - if you are going to ever do something like this, make sure the harder fruit is on the bottom. Some of the more tender apricots got kind of smashed in our bag there. But Jason decided he loves nectarines, though subsequent visits to the store have only ended in disappointment. You don't often find fresh fruit at the store. We've had some really good strawberries from the farmer's marked in Pleasanton, but in stores it's just so hard.

So that was our haul. I ended up dehydrating a lot of it. The strawberries and apricots were delicious, but I didn't really like the peaches and nectarines. Tiffany and Luke made jam!! It was fantastic. I wish that was a never ending jar. We went through it so fast. They used low amounts of sweetener, so it actually tasted like the fruit. Some of it was kind of tart, but it was delicious.

Anyway, so as is common we went back and ate a heap of food. We had bbq chicken, bbq sweet white corn (if you do this, you must soak it in water for about an hour before hand, then grill [still with husks on] - it makes it so tender!), and numerous other things. I'm sure broccoli was in there, and that night I made an apple pie. Paul and Maggie came home from windsurfing to find a lot of fruit! Maggie said the apricot was the best she's ever had. Mmmm...