The little wild strawberries that make their home in various parts of my yard are ripe:
They are very sweet and good.
The local strawberry season has also begun for the more commercial variety of strawberries. Our favorite U-Pick farm stopped growing strawberries a couple of years ago and we missed it terribly, but it is not really worth driving to the opposite end of the county to pick strawberries (25 – 30 miles) so we just bought baskets at farm stands.
Another orchard started having some self-pick strawberry fields this year and we went up today. After picking 10 pounds of strawberries I could hardly stand up, and I am not sure it was totally worthwhile.
The old strawberry farm had a small, intensely flavorful strawberry, which I loved. These strawberries are large and fairly firm. It is easy to pick them without bruising them. But they don’t have that intense strawberry flavor that the best strawberries should have, and that I expect when I have just picked them off the vine. Even when they are ripe at the edge of over-ripeness the flavor is lacking. This kind of strawberry I can buy in the store without consequence to my back.
These were the prices at the farm stand:
U-Pick $1.49 per pound
Pre-picked $4.29 per quart
When I got home I weighed a quart basket and it was about a pound. So the money savings even made up for the gas spent driving to the farm and back (about a gallon) But the strawberries were no better than those in the store, which are cheaper now (of course I don’t know what the actual energy cost to get them to me is either).
What I want to find is a farm that still grows the old-fashioned, flavorful strawberries that would perfume the house and had that rich strawberry flavor. Those strawberries would be worth bending over and picking, or worth paying for.
Meanwhile I will eat all the little wild strawberries that I can find. Since I am behind on weeding this year, they are plentiful.