Strawberry crop almost ready to pick

Local strawberries almost ready to pick, as festival celebrating fruit also on horizon

For many Northeast Ohioans, picking strawberries is a time-honored family tradition.

Several area farms offer the chance to pick your own berries, and they sell them pre-picked at their farm markets.

“We need a couple of warm days before we can open our you-pick operation,” said Larry Secor, whose Perry Township farm began picking for its farm market on May 28. “Strawberries like temperatures in the 60s and 70s.”

He figures his pick-yourown strawberries will be ready on June 10 — or maybe a day or two before that. Secor permits pickers to bring their own containers from home. They’re weighed empty, and the pickers are charged $2.98 per pound for the berries they pick.

“People bring everything from Tupperware to pails for their berry picking, but we also can sell them containers,” he said.

“It’s very weather-dependent,” said Tina Klco of Rainbow Farms. “We’re just a half-mile from the lake, which keeps our berries from ripening as early as those grown to the south of us.”

Rainbow Farms is, however, taking a few quarts of strawberries to each of the half dozen farmers markets it serves.

It’s best to pick the fragile local berries before noon and go directly home to prepare them, she said, especially if the strawberries are destined to become jam or jelly.

“If you are coming out to pick, get your sugar and your canning jars first,” Klco said.

The locally grown strawberries are so different from supermarket berries that they might be considered by some as a different fruit altogether.

The large, fat commercial berries are those used at the Kirtland Kiwanis Strawberry Festival, June 15 to 18, because local farms can’t supply enough berries and still have some for area berry pickers.

Strawberries brought from California and Florida are bred to be sturdy to resist the rigors of shipping, but they aren’t nearly as flavorful as the tender and juicy Northeast Ohio strawberries.

“People need to call first to make sure our berries are ripe and the fields haven’t been picked out,” advised Ame West of West Orchards in Perry.

Strawberry growers typically close off fields that have been picked to allow new berries to ripen.

“Ours are now all the same size,” said West. “It could be they’ll all ripen at once.”

The West farm has its strawberry fields behind its farm market off Route 20.

“We make it easy for folks to park at the market and walk to the picking,” West said.

Every season is slightly different, said Nancy Patterson, matriarch of the fourth-generation family-operated Patterson Fruit Farm. The Pattersons have offered pick-your-own berries for decades at their Chester Township farm and are accustomed to seeing subsequent generations bring their children and grandchildren to pick strawberries.

Children can be a common sight at the you-pick sites.

“We welcome children who come to pick,” said Tina Klco. “We just don’t allow them to go running through the fields.”

Every strawberry lover has a favorite way to enjoy the berries. They’re great over cereal, with a little cream or on a shortcake. Try them sliced with a little balsamic vinegar and a grind of black pepper.

Larry Secor fondly remembers his late mother making Bisquick biscuits, topping them with strawberries and Cool Whip. But he prefers to stop for soft-serve ice cream at the new Dairy Queen in Perry, bringing it home and piling fresh picked berries into the carton.

“I’ll sit down and eat them while I’m watching TV,” Secor said. “No fuss, no muss, no mess.”