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Jun 14, 2009 10:55 pm US/Central
Finding Minnesota: Picking Your Own Strawberries
WHITE BEAR LAKE, Minn. (WCCO) ―
Beginning this week, it is officially strawberry picking season in Minnesota. That means all those "Pick Your Own" places will be jumping for the next month.
And there's one farm in Washington County where strawberries are big business and family business.
Bill Jacobson and his five siblings have one of the biggest strawberry patches in Minnesota. The plants cover 20 acres at Pine Tree Apple Orchard in White Bear Lake.
On a tour of the fields to look at some of the plants, many of those strawberries are still kind of green.
"Yeah, there are quite a few here," said Jacobson, who said he's happy about the number and shape of fruit on the plants.
"They all look like they're going to be nice, pretty little strawberries," he said.
As the name implies, apples are the main attraction at this pick your own place. But come mid-June, strawberries are the stars.
The farmers are giving the berries calcium and potassium to improve the flavor and firmness, but it is sunshine and warmth that they really need.
Jacobson described what he thinks makes strawberries so attractive to people.
"Homegrown strawberries got tremendous flavor. They really beat the heck out of anything that's been shipped in for a couple thousand miles. They're great for you, more vitamin C than orange juice. Vitamin A. All sorts of good stuff in there for you," he said.
And that good stuff has been known to draw a crowd, not just at Pine Tree but also at strawberry patches across the state.
Once those berries are red and ripe, it's not uncommon to find traffic jams as people give in to the call to pick your own.
Jacobson said that in recent years, however, folks seem to be taking home smaller stashes.
"In the 1980s, when we got started, the pick your own strawberry craze was probably at its peak and it was not uncommon then to have carloads of people, mom, daughter, sister... everyone come out and fill up a station wagon full of strawberries and then go home and work for a few hours canning them, freezing them or whatever it was they were going to do," he said.
"Nowadays, we are so used to having our fruits and vegetables year-round in the supermarket, we're getting them in just smaller doses and people really don't know how to handle large quantities," Jacobson added.
If you're not into making jams and jellies, freezing strawberries is an easy option. You can leave them whole or slice them up, and you can add sugar too if you like.
If you do decide to go out to a patch, you should know there is a right and a wrong way to pick a berry.
"You want to pick them with the cap and the stem on. You see some people they're de-stemming them in the field. That's like taking a bottle of wine, taking the cork out, it's going to spoil. So leave caps and stems in tack. Keep them in your refrigerator," said Jacobson.
There's also a right way for keeping strawberries fresh in the fridge.
Don't wash them off when you first bring them home. Wait until just before you serve them or use them, to rinse them off. This will help prevent them from becoming mushy and moldy.
If you like to freeze strawberries, they can keep in the freezer about nine months, according to Jacobson.
If you want more advice on how to handle, store and cook with strawberries, you can find it on the
Pine Tree Apple Orchard Web site.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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