‘Strawberry Picking’ Articles at Sweetnicks

June is the perfect time for strawberry picking, so we headed out in search of the perfect place this past weekend.

There are a few farms that are reasonably close to us that offer strawberry picking for customers. A few of them I avoid because they have turned into a three-ring-circus and have the penchant for charging for everything under the sun and shuttle buses for parking.

No thank you.

Ort Farms came up in my search, and while I have heard of them before, we haven’t visited them before, so we set our sights on checking it out this past weekend. Easy to find, especially with the Waze app, it’s a scenic, windy drive through the “country,” and plenty of parking awaited us.

The farm sits on 400 acres of land and has been there for 100 years, with six generations of family participating (their founding member has lived on the farm for 85 years!). Despite their long history, this is actually their first year to offer u-pick for strawberries.

We stopped into the little store in front to get instructions, and they gave us boxes to collect our strawberries, a small sheet of directions, and away we went.

The weather was perfect. Clear skies, a slight breeze, and nothing but patches after patches of strawberries waiting for us to pick. I instructed the kids on what we were looking for … uniformly red, nice size, not mushy. And the farther we walked, the more paydirt we hit. There were other families there picking strawberries as well, but it wasn’t super crowded, and we had plenty of space to ourselves.

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Big open fields, the freshest strawberries imaginable … let’s visit a farm in Chester for strawberry picking.

“Mom, those aren’t really strawberry picking shoes,” Nick said as he looked at my feet.

I looked down at my (now) very dusty shoes and, of course, he was right.

But we were in the middle of a hike out to the large strawberry patches to pick our own, and there was no turning back.

Of course choosing to go strawberry picking in the middle of big open fields (read: no shade) on a 93 degree afternoon probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but I’d like to think it made our strawberry picking much more efficient.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Although we have gone apple picking many times over the years, we have, surprisingly, never gone strawberry picking, which is how it ended up one of the items on our Summer Bucket List.

We ended up going to Alstede Farms in Chester, easy to get to and only about half an hour from our house. Although it is a frequent destination for area school field trips, I had never been there prior to this year, and I’ve now gone twice in the last month (Madeline had a field trip there a few weeks ago).

We pulled into the dusty, gravel parking lot, parked our car, and headed over to the shack to pay for our admission. Five dollars per person to go picking. With your admission, you will each get a ticket good for two dollars off your strawberry purchases, which are weighed and paid for separately when you’re done, so that makes it a good deal. The strawberries are $3.39 a pound, and then less your discount, so a fun adventure, cheaper than your local grocery store, and access to fresher than fresh strawberries.

In other words, a good time.

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Visit: Strawberry Picking at Ort Farms {Long Valley, New Jersey}

Visit: Alstede Farms, Chester, NJ {Summer Bucket List}