Monday, July 14, 2014

Strawberry Season

So our Mom had the brilliant idea of taking all the kids strawberry picking while Jess was in town. Turns out Deacon is at an amazing age for things like that; old enough to love wandering around picking strawberries but not old enough to understand why he should wait instead of just stuffing them in his mouth ;)


This was how he looked leaving the farm. DJ is much cleaner because he was very industriously filling his berry basket. Only with berries that the bugs had eaten.

Mama's little helpers *cough*
 We were a little bit concerned that this outing would just end with us buying berries at the gate. We walk all of the way out to the field, put about eight berries in our baskets, and Sophie announces that she has to pee. Katie of course has to go to. So one adult down, roaming the fields in search of a potty. Hunter then decides it's milk time. Adult number two is now nursing in the strawberry patch, leaving Mom (adult number three) with the boys and the baskets. Until DJ needs to find a tree (the recently potty trained can't be trusted to hold it while hiking over food crops), so off they go with Deacon in tow. Approximate time spent vs berry count at this point: 25 minutes and twelve berries. (This is an estimate, as I was still peeing children while discussing pirates in the corner of a musty barn.)


Things went perfectly after that though. Hunter was chilling on the baby carrier, Katie played with her and picked berries. Sophie took the filling of her bucket pretty seriously and refused to pose for pictures unfortunately. (Also unfortunate is the fact that I didn't take any of these pictures. Mom was awesome enough to corral Deacon and take all of the pictures while still contributing to the berry basket.) We ended up leaving with almost more than we could carry!

Then of course we  had to stuff our faces with them and figure out what to do with 20 quarts of strawberries.

Mom went on a blitz and froze a good chunk of them that night. I canned the rest. Strawberry mint syrup and strawberry butter anyone?

P.S. What's your favorite thing to do with frozen strawberries?

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