I had never been strawberry picking until today. A kind friend and her daughter took me. We were accompanied by a delightful 2 year old girl who was very good about respecting the rows. We went out of the city to the big river plain of the St. Lawrence where a lot of the produce that feeds the city is grown. It is best to go early in the day as there is no shade and the sun beats down without mercy. Today there was a kind breeze so my hat, forgotten in another car, was not missed. The farm is what is known as a “u- pick” which means that you can buy a basket and spend as much or as little time as you want filling it. You can eat as many strawberries as you like too! There were plenty of pickers, domestics like us and down at the end of the field, professionals. They wore sensible hats and never lifted their eyes to the amazing little white clouds that sat cheekily in the sky like something out of a surrealist painting. There was a school bus that obviously shuttled them to and out of the fields and a bored looking man sat in a lawn chair and watched them? supervised them? made sure they didn’t wander away? You can see that the fruit is quite big. There are clusters and the individual fruits ripen at different times so picking will certainly go on for another couple of weeks. The edges of the fields are full of wild flowers and I wonder how the farmer keeps down weeds. Herbicides? I must hope that the straw( strawberries, right?) keeps them down. I came home and washed and froze them. I liked doing it….next blueberries.