Strawberry picking

Summertime is when all the tasty fruits 'bloom' and are cheap. Ping have always wanted to go berries picking (well since no berry plant can grow in M'sia), especially strawberries. Ping loves blueberries too but don't really know what to do with it besides eating it with cereal. Raspberry is so so only because most of the time they are sour.

So this weekend, a bunch of us drove down to Sturgis, which is about an hour south of Lansing, to a fruit farm - Nottawa Fruit Farm. The strawberries picking season is only about 3 weeks. They are pretty fragile fruit as we also saw lots of 'chau' strawberries. Strawberry plant is a bushy plant that is only about 1 feet tall. According to Wiki, the strawberry fruit that we're eating is actually not the fruit but an accessory fruit. The real fruit of the strawberry plant is actually the small biji that is inside the strawberry.

We got there close to closing time so we only spent about 30 mins there, which was good enough because Ping got tons of strawberries!! When you get there, they give you a basket made out of a box and guide you to a patch where it has not been picked. The plants are arranged in neat parallel rows and they'll tell you where to start and where's your limit. Since they are low on the ground, it can get pretty messy but we were lucky because it hasn't been raining for a few days and it was hot enough that the ground was dry. The strawberries are usually not obvious. You have to move the leaves around and look inside the bushes for the strawberries. They are much smaller than the ones we can buy from Meijer but as long as it is sweet, how small also never mind ler.

Pick pick pick....Guess how much this costs...
USD2.30 only ar!!! It is 50cents a pound!! Usually for that price, can only get 1 lb from Meijer. Bigger and looks prettier lah but size and look does not matter when it will eventually be eaten right???