ETC: Pick Your Own

Close to us is a blueberry farm that operates on the self pick model. Most farms grow their product and harvest with machines or with hired labor and then rely on re-sellers, stores, to get their product to the public. I imagine that over the long haul this is the most efficient model as it's widely followed. There are a few farmers though that sell you not only their crop, but the experience of picking it yourself. We pick blueberries, but there are also strawberries, apples and various other fruits that we could pick. I kind of wish you could pick cows like this. Look over the herd, pet a few of them, decide which one you want to eat and then take them to the butcher. That would be more fun that just picking steak in the store, but I digress.
We've been taking the kids to pick blueberries for about six years now and it's always been a good time. The particular farm we go to is organic, which I'm usually ambivalent about, but when the little kids are shoveling berries straight from the bushes into their months as fast as they can, it's a good feeling. The picking used to go slow as we spent as much time corralling kids as we did picking. The sessions were also short. We could pick for as long as it took kids to fill up and start feeling sick to their stomach (don't worry, eating berries is encouraged by the management). This year though we really got in the groove. The berries were fat, the kids are getting big enough to contribute to the poundage, and the weather was perfect. We came home with 26.5 pounds of berries. That's a lot of berries. We might have gone slightly overboard. We ate about half of them and froze the other half. We'll enjoy them through the rest of the year.

With a little bit of internet searching you can probably find someplace near you that will let you pick your own fruits and enjoy them. There probably won't be much cost savings when it's all said and done, but you get to show your kids where their food comes from. Real apple trees. Real blueberry bushes. It's fun and instructional and I highly recommend spending half a day out picking your own.