A Berry-full Day!

Strawberry Pickin' And Processin'-Plus How I Make My Favorite Face Mask!

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Well hello and a berry good evening to you all! Let me tell you my Steempeeps, the last forty-eight hours have been a marathon of epic proportions! I spent Wednesday evening in a show beef clinic with my 4-H beeflings, got up at the crack of dawn and picked almost fifty pounds of strawberries, went to the library and helped facilitate a play on the life of Mozart for a hundred people, played Magic the Gathering EDH until midnight, and got up and canned strawberry jam all day. In all honesty, I am not really sure what day it is at this point. However, I am getting a bit ahead of myself, as this post is not about a couple days in the like of Kat but rather about what I do with strawberries!

Usually I just have to walk out to the orchard and pick my yearly strawberry harvest requirement, BUT bad planning and the putting in of a new crop of plants meant that I had to take a trip to one of my favorite U-pick farms to replenish my yearly strawberry stock. The farm that I headed to is called Carver Farms, a place of sheer small U-pick farm enjoyment! I have been driving to Newman Lake, Washington and picking everything from Walla Walla onions to strawberries off of Carver Farms eighty acres for fifteen years. It's a really cool family run farm with a smashing pumpkin (heh) patch.

For years I would call the ladies at Carver Farms inquiring about opening day for strawberry picking, but these days all one needs to do is give their Facebook or website pages a glance to know when opening day is or what is in season. So, armed with the knowledge that yesterday was the beginning of picking, my family and our neighbor's crew found ourselves hurtling toward the strawberry patch.

In all the years I have been picking stuff at Carvers, I have never seen the sheer volume of people present that was in the field that day. I guess the secret is out! There was a line of cars 80 acres in length at the 7am opening time. It was bananas, er berries!

Another shocker is that there were so many people there that we had to wait in line 30 minutes to have our fruit weighed and paid. I mean, I picked twenty pounds of berries in fifteen minutes, as this year's crop is amazingly plentiful, so I had a good chuckle as I stood in line on a farm. In fact, I commented on how incredible the whole thing was to one of the ladies that are always present in the scale shack, a lady that I have been chatting with every year now for years, and she was just as awed as I was.:)

Berries procured and a doughnut pit stop executed for the son of GK, we made it home. My family left me in the kitchen, they went out and got the tractor so they could drill the hundred or so post holes that we need for our outdoor arena. I had to be to work at two, so I got to washing and hulling the berries. Let me tell you, processing fifty pounds of berries all by your lonesome takes a bit of time, and a lot of Tame Impala...Feel for the puppies people, they were heavily serenaded while I worked.

Half of my berries were for jam, which I will get to in a moment, but the other half I washed, hulled, and spread in a single layer on wax paper for individual freezing. Why do I do this? Well, a lot of the time you don't need an entire gallon of berries for something, like a smoothie for example, so if you freeze the berries individually and repackage them, you can just grab what you need instead of thawing and having to use a whole bag. Sometimes I use my head. Hmmm, that might be an exaggeration.

Anyway, it takes awhile to freeze berries individually and repackage them, but as I do our family's year supply at one time, I just suck it up and get it done.

Today, I had to deal with the other half of the berries, and by that I mean it was strawberry jam time. If you examined my son's DNA you would probably find the DNA of peanuts heavily interspersed in his genetic profile. That kid eats an incredible amount of peanut butter and jelly, and he informed me the other day that, "Mom, we are out of jam, and I don't like store jam. Yours is the best." As I labored and sweated my way through about twenty pounds of jam making today, I just kept reminding myself of that sweet and appreciative sentiment that my Bobo expressed. Jam-making motivation achieved so to speak.

After plucking pint after pint out of the canner, I realized that I was pretty tired after all of the past couple day's worth of excitement and decided to head to my bathroom for a nice soak in the tub. As I headed to my bathroom I grabbed the bowl that I had placed four big strawberries in earlier that day. You see, one of my favorite strawberry things is my homemade strawberry and honey face mask. The mask's entire composition is four smashed strawberries of moderate size and a teaspoon of local honey. That's it, no strange ingredients that could probably fuel one of Elon Musk's rockets, just things that I would put into my belly. My simple little face mask meets all of my skin care requirements, it takes little prep, is fun to slather on my mug, and makes my skin super happy after it chills out on my face for about fifteen minutes. I usually just slather it on my face and read for a bit or soak in the tub, then I wash the residue off and slather on some moisturizer. It also entertains the inner infant in yours truly as it's kind of like getting to play with finger paints, and my face often ends up resembling the exposed innards of some weird Star Wars creature by the time mask application is complete. Fun times. Anyway, if you like skincare things made out of food and have the maturity level of a preschooler you should give it a try!

And now I am going to go curl up with my corgi baby and read a story about the Phaistos Disk. Hope you all are having a fabulous evening!

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And as always, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's strawberry carcass smeared iPhone.

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