berry season

Ahhhh, berry season, my favorite! I'm just waiting for the wild blackberries around our property to ripen...yum! We recently went berry picking with a playgroup at Swanton Berry Farm . If you are ever on the coast north of Santa Cruz, please go there. I didn't get pictures of there farm stand, but we go there often. Its a sweet set-up. Lots of homemade treats and coffee, tables, chairs, couches, wooden toys, old school wooden games and books. Outside of the farm stand they usually have some kind of play area with hay bales set up. The staff is great and I recently bought 3 jam flats of berries for cheap:) Organic of coarse! We LOVE it there.

We had never picked there before, but we picked strawberries and olallieberries. It was so beautiful, a perfect cool coastal farm. The boys had so much fun! Sorry the pictures arn't too great. It seems that if I take less then 500 pictures of the same thing I don't get great ones:)

serious berry picker

strawberry fields

now that's how to plant strawberries!

Bugs keep eating mine, I think we will have to make some raised rows and transplant ours!

I do wish I could find a blueberry farm around here:( No wonder they cost so much!

I made a small batch of strawberry jam last week. I have been freezing them as I get them, so I'm hoping to get them all canned up in the next week or so:)

Happy berrying!