Strawberries!

There are SO MANY things I love about Michigan, and near the top of the list? Fruit.  I don't know if it's the soil, or the immigrants who moved here a century ago, or the water levels, but fruit abounds in this state.  I can hardly keep track of what u-pick season it is at any given time.  I seriously almost missed strawberry season this year!

In fact, strawberries came in several weeks ago, but thankfully the farms around here can stretch the season for about five or six weeks, so we hit the middle of the run.  There aren't a ton of strawberry farms around here, and believe me, I get it.  Having grown strawberries myself, they are labor intensive, fighting the slugs, moisture, bugs while laying down straw underneath the plants to discourage weeds.

Glo had had a long day at work (a ten hour shift, flipping burgers....yeah, my kids can do REALLY hard things), and she was feeling like she wasn't really getting to enjoy the summer.  Hence, strawberry picking.  There's nothing like getting outside during a Michigan summer to make you FEEL like you're enjoying a Michigan summer.  We headed down to Rowe's in Ypsi, a place that John says he visited as a kid.  Rows and rows of strawberries, and it didn't take us even an hour to pick 24 pounds of strawberries.  And it took all of five minutes for us to pick half a peck of sugar snap peas, Peter Piper.  Poor peas though--they weren't provided with anything to climb, so they were just laying in tangled heaps on the ground.  It doesn't appear to affect the taste though--they are sweet as anything.

The picking though is the fun part, am I right? The real work happens once we bring the fruit home.  With no preservatives, it goes bad quickly.  So I started with strawberry scones for breakfast.  And then we started freezing the strawberries in a single layer on cookie sheets.  And then I served up strawberries and granola and yogurt.  And then John and I finished off several pounds by making eight containers of freezer jam.  I don't know about it though--DOUBLE the sugar to the amount of strawberries?  But our frozen strawberries look amazing--they aren't all mushy, but are firm and red and beautiful!

Judging by how much we enjoyed our frozen blueberries over the winter (but picked last summer), I think the strawberries will serve us just fine once the snow falls.  It's just a matter of finding room for them in the freezer along with our 1/2 a cow ;-)