We enjoyed some strawberry picking yesterday with some friends. I had my four children and my friend had her three boys. It was chaos at times, but it was a lot of fun!
We went to Stade's Farm & Market in McHenry, IL. The farm is run by Christians, and every Sunday they invite a local church to come and lead a worship service there at the farm. A friend of mine had gone with her family this past Sunday and said they heard the praise music while they picked strawberries. :)
The farm opens at 9, and I had wanted to be there right when it opened so we could pick and be done before it got too hot. Well, we were about 10 minutes behind schedule when we left and didn't get there until about 9:15. I guess that's not too bad for a 45 minute drive with 4 kids by myself!
When we started out, all 7 kids had hats on. When we left, no one had a hat on and one of my friend's boys lost his green hat somewhere in the green strawberry plants! Her youngest boy choked briefly on a piece of strawberry. My Addy didn't want to help pick and just wandered around. Iris ate way too many strawberries and had what looked like a murder scene on her shirt from all the strawberry juices! Lily did a great job of actually picking and filling her basket, but when I went to inspect the content I noticed she had a lot of little unripe green strawberries. :) Ah, kids...
I ended up with about 5 1/2 pounds of strawberries when we picked through the unripe or mushy ones in our baskets. I also picked up some fresh asparagus and radishes. Yum! We spent only $15 for all of that! The strawberries were $1.75/lb, which was the cheapest I had scene yet all season (until this week, actually. The stores have 1 lb containers for $1.50 now, but they are nowhere near as fresh!)! I was very happy of the quality for that price! They were so sweet and juicy. We do have quite a few tart ones because I apparently didn't pick through Lily's collection well enough and we ended up with several smaller, not quite ripe ones. Oh well. We cut those up and put them on Cheerios this morning for breakfast. :)
Click HERE for a link to Stade's Farm & Market website. They are also on Facebook. Great farm, nice people, fantastic produce!
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