Tuesday, my seven year old daughter and I went strawberry picking in Connecticut. It was the day after her last day of school and one of the few mornings not marred by rain. I had been trying to find the best day and it looked like this was it. A search of the web led me to either Jones Farm, Bishop’s Orchard or Lyman’s Farm. Each had a 24x7 hotline where you can check the days available for picking, the prices and other information. The prices and times varied a little bit. Jones Farm cost more than Bishops or Lyman’s but is closer to where I live, so unless I picked more than twenty three pounds of strawberries, when you factor in the price of gas, it was the least expensive. Lyman’s might well have been even cheaper, but you needed to add in the price of the berry basket there and I wasn’t up for that level of calculations. After all, Jones’ Farm is a pleasant drive and a pleasant place to pick.

Their berry patch is not far from a wonderful orchard where we buy our cider in the fall and Fiona wanted to stop there to pick up some fresh cider. However, they were closed and it led to a good discussion about which crops are in season when and how it is always best to try and eat local food in season whenever possible.

We’ve normally gone to Jones’ Farm on the busiest of picking days and it was quite a contrast to enter a nearly empty parking lot. We walked out to the fields and started picking on our assigned row. The berries were bountiful and in less than an hour, we had picked more than eighteen pounds. My extroverted daughter struck up a conversation with just about everyone within hearing distance and there were several other families picking berries and planning to make jam.

At home, I ran out to pick up sugar, lemons and canning jars and we proceeded to use about half the berries. The recipe that we used called for four cups of smashed strawberries, four cups of sugar and a half cup of lemon juice. I hulled the strawberries and handed them to Fiona who put them in a four quart measuring cup and smashed them with a potato masher. We sanitized the canning jars in the dishwasher and cooked up the jam on the stove top. After all the work of the project, we ended up with the equivalent of about eighteen eight ounce jars of jam.

Doing some back of the envelop calculations, the materials for the jam costs about half as much as a typical jar of jam in a local grocery store. However, that is a misleading calculation in many ways. When you include the cost of labor, the jam probably costs twice as much. If you factor in the costs of the jam that we’ve given away to family and friends it becomes even more prohibitive.

On the other side of the equation, I don’t mean to brag, but I think the jam is orders of magnitude better than typical store bought jam. More importantly, the money we spent in Shelton stays in the local economy. The farm gets some of the money. Some of that goes to the folks working at the farm which will hopefully also stay in the local economy. While there was some fuel burnt in driving to the farm, there wasn’t the fuel burnt in having the jam shipped from Ohio. Perhaps most importantly, Fiona and I had a wonderful day together. She learned more about the joy of picking fresh berries and making jam; experiences and lessons that will serve her well in the years to come.