I’ve been really wanting to go to to a pick your own farm and today we made a day of it. We went to Parkside PYO which was only about half an hour so unlike some of our other day trips (ahem, three hours in the car each way to Brighton) we had an easy journey. Parkside was a massive, well-organised and friendly farm and it was a really lovely day!

We picked strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, tayberries (apparently a blackberry-raspberry hybrid) and then headed to the veg patch for courgettes, beetroot and french beans. Blackcurrents were also in season but a bit picked over and onions, spinach and swiss chard were available too.

Here is a picture of our haul:

We started out by accidentally picking off-limits strawberries (I guess they’d just been sprayed with pesticides–eek!) so we got some REALLY nice ones. Otherwise the strawberries were a bit picked over. Blackberries had literally just come in season today so we got lucky on that. We were told the best day to go is Tuesday because the farm is closed Monday.

This really is such a brilliant thing to do with your kids. Every query of “shall we pick some (insert vegetable)?” was met by “I love (insert vegetable)!” and finding ripe raspberries was like a treasure hunt. It was really fun. Maybe I had the most fun!

Afterward we went home to make jam. I’ve never made jam but this recipe by Jamie Oliver looked super-easy and they sold jam sugar at the farm. I’m just not sure we cooked it all long enough because nothing is quite firming up. The jars are all in the fridge now so we’ll see…

Here are our lovely clean strawberries.

Here they are mashed up on the stove.

And once they’ve been cooked up.

This is the mixed berry jam before cooking. I mean, YUM.

We made LOTS! I followed Jamie’s preserving method mentioned in the barbecue sauce recipe from the Jamie’s America cookery book. Submerge the jars in boiling water for 10 minutes. The lids all popped down, so I’m hoping this won’t kill us later…

Finally, we made labels.

Highly recommend!