Pickin'!

I'm totally on a seasonal eating kick right now along with the whole canning thing. Also, freezing. I'm buying a deep freezer this week so I can preserve some of the stuff from my garden and also produce from friends and farmer's markets.

One of the things that I lack in my own garden is fruit. Now, I am growing blackberries this year but they take a year or two to produce so I have a couple teeny tiny ones and that's it. And I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE fruit. When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey.  It's about picking blueberries, which I did often, living in Michigan. I've always loved going picking and have dragged various friends and family members to pick fruit, and have even gone on my own. If you have kids or have friends with kids, I HIGHLY suggest checking the book out!

Anyone who lives in St. Louis HAS to go to Eckert's to pick fruit. They have several varieties of apples, plus strawberries, blackberries, and peaches, varying from farm to farm. They also have pumpkins and Christmas trees for those seasons.

I knew I wanted to go peach and blackberry picking and got my mom to go with me last week on Friday. At first, she wasn't going to come at all because the forecast was HOT. But she came.We went to the Grafton farm and arrived around 11am.

See these rows? Empty. That's what 100 degree weather does!

No one was there so no competition.

There were a lot of unripe berries, but lots of ripe ones too. And they were HUGE.

My hand isn't big. But these berries were seriously gigantic.

We picked and sweated, picked and sweated. We were going fast and barely talking because it was so hot. In the end, we picked 20 pounds.

We picked peaches too, but... FAST. And no camera came out because we were sweating so badly. We ended up with 25 pounds.

That is a LOT of fruit!

I can't wait to go back to Eckert's... maybe even for peaches again, but definitely for apples.

Stay tuned for what I did with all this fruit!

I'm not the only one who loves Eckert's!!!