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!!!

Raspberry Adventures!

Lakeview Farms, take two! After being turned away so early last Saturday and not being able to pick, I decided I would attempt to drag myself out of bed early one day this week to go try to pick again. Wednesday morning, I did just that! Anyone who knows me know that getting up at 7am is difficult. Even on a work day. But I did it!

Arriving at the farm, I noticed it wasn't too busy. Score! One cool thing about this farm is that instead of going on a picking free for all, they give you your own area to pick in. That way, no one is infringing upon your territory and they can keep track of where has been picked over so the next person who comes to pick goes in an area with riper, not yet picked berries. That's a good model in my mind!

I started picking. The pickings were great! Lots of ripe berries to choose from. I really dug in there to get good ones. Raspberry bushes are prickly so it got a bit uncomfortable, but was worth it!
In no time, I had filled up several containers.
Looking to the west, the sky was ominous. I started picking like mad, worried that the skies might unleash upon me at any minute. People started fleeing to their cars. Dangit, I was going to fill all of my containers. If I got a little wet, it wouldn't do me any harm. I finished just as the sky looked like this:
I wanted to strawberry pick, but the lady where I paid said they would probably close so I decided to leave. I ended up with 8 containers. Total cost? $15.
Yummy, yummy berries! This much would've cost $24-36 at a store! So what did I do? I turned these into this:
And this:
DELISH!

To make the jam, I used 6 containers, about 1 cup of agave nectar, juice of 1 lemon, and a squirt of honey. Used my immersion blender (what a handy tool!!) and boiled it for about 30 minutes. Then followed standard canning procedures. I saved a cup of jam to make the raspberry oatmeal bars. Here is the recipe I used. It turned out great!! And I feel good that I hand picked the raspberries at a local farm and turned it into these yummy treats. I might go again tomorrow. I'm addicted!!