Strawberry Fields

Grafton is now an experienced strawberry picker!  We took him to Dickinson Farms, in Granby, MA, for a warm, sunny evening of strawberry harvesting.  He made the long walk to the fields pretty much on his own, and only stopped once or twice to acquire some rocks on the way out.

As we started filling up our cardboard tray with berries, he removed them nearly as fast, stuffing them in his mouth, red juice flowing down his chin and forearms.  He satiated himself in time, and then started helping us pick.  First, by taking the berries that his parents plucked and placing them into the tray, and before long, by finding and extracting the berries on his own.  Not all of his were juicy and ripe, so we tried to teach him the qualities of strawberries worth picking, and in the end he found some really nice ones.  When he tired of the chore of picking and stowing berries, he had fun romping up and down the narrow aisles, and occasionally hopping laterally between the rows.  He found an irrigation sprinkler and made sure he understood how it worked before resuming his explorations.

After picking as many as we could conceivably consume in a week's time, we headed back to the farm stand to weigh our harvest and pay up.  It's a good thing the farm did not have a policy against eating berries in the fields, because Grafton definitely would have been caught "red handed".

Blueberries will be ready in early July, and Grafton and his parents will be out there picking!