Strawberry Picking

I work with large farms all over the United States but it is always fun to work with farms local to San Diego. San Diego County has the most small farms in the United States. Kenny’s Strawberry Farm is one of 5,000 farms local to San Diego and I visited their u-pick location for some fresh berries. Their farm is located thirty minutes east of the ocean, which is perfect growing conditions for strawberries. Strawberries grow well by the ocean because they like sunny days and the foggy nights that come with it.

Leave some of the stem on your strawberries, don’t pull the fruit off of the vine. If you pull the top off, it exposes the strawberry and causes it to rot.

When I got to the u-pick farm, they handed me a red bucket and there were signs explaining how to correctly pick a strawberry. You want to pick them from the stem and not pull it from the fruit because if you pull the top off, it exposes the actual fruit and the strawberries will rot quicker. It was busy but there were plenty of rows to choose from. I selected a row that had mud in it because not everyone wanted to walk past it for the ripe strawberries.

One thing I noticed is that strawberry fields have a black plastic mulch on top of the row and in between the plants. This mulch protects the fruit from touching the soil and it also helps conserve water. Right on top of the mulch are black pipes. This is a drip irrigation system that runs along the row to water the strawberry plants. It actually conserves water and also keeps the water from touching the fruit. The reason why you don’t want water to touch the fruit is because it can make the strawberries moldy.

Kenny’s strawberry farm plants in October and they start harvesting in December, because it takes about 3 months for them to grow any berries. Then they harvest all the way through July. California grows 88% of all strawberries in the United States and San Diego ends up growing most of the strawberries in the winter. At peak season, Kenny’s can go through the fields and pick a new harvest every three days.

Strawberries are hand picked to ensure the best quality, they do not use any machinery to do the harvesting. I had to stop myself from picking or else I was going to end up harvesting all 150,000 of their strawberry plants.

When I was done, I took my red bucket to the strawberry stand to get them weighed. The farm itself was cute, fun and clean. I loved being able to visit a farm local to San Diego.

Sources: https://www.calstrawberry.com/en-us/ https://www.sdfarmbureau.org/