Berry Bonanza!!!

I swear we hand picked them all today!  Just didn't think to break out the camera until all the hard labor was completed.

My friend Anna and I made the trek west and down the Taconic Parkway to Chatham, NY to visit Berry Farm - a very cool organic and basically solar powered year round farm to pick strawberries!  Turns out their strawberry operation is only a small fraction of their business.  One of the store keepers gave us a brief tour of their greenhouses, one of which is geothermal.  Beautiful, small farm with amazing staff and insane strawberries.  Although the store keeper had some doubt about our harvesting stamina - Anna and I picked about 17 quarts or something like 23 lbs. of strawberries.  I tend to get a little carried away when I know something is soon going to become unavailable - I think they call it hoarding.

We picked, we shopped a little, getting some extras from their farm stand like garlic scapes and a tub of ice cream to split on the drive back.  Then we headed back to the great state of Massachusetts to prepare a meal for friends.  Anna pan fried some fish in coconut oil and garnished them with lightly sauteed garlic scapes and scallions, while I made some pasta with kale from the garden and Hannah made a salad of lettuce and arugula (also from the garden).

Beautiful night to have a meal outdoors

I snuck away to get my camera!

Jack hearts Kale!

After dins, we started on the berries and there was a lot of snickering around the topic of sucking the air out of the freezer....mostly around who sucked the most.

And the winner is.....

All in all, it was quite a busy day.  Lettuce harvesting, pea re-trellising, planting the food bank plot (again), some experimental cucumber trellising and tons of hand weeding and hoeing.  After being away for a few days and feeling a bit off kilter, spending the majority of my day working in the garden proved to be quite therapeutic and a bit tiring!