Looking for berries, berries for jam...

Some of the farms near us allow you to come pick your own produce for really amazing prices.  This weekend the strawberries were ripe so we took the kids up to pick a few.  We really wanted to make freezer jam since we miss stealing my mom's from her freezer.  Neither of the kids have any experience whatsoever with gardening/farming/etc and I don't think they even knew where strawberries come from so we thought it would be good for them to see where food really comes from.  The farmer gave us some crates to use to pick the berries in.  We thought that if we each filled a crate, we might have 5 -6 pounds, enough to make two batches of jam.

Jackson LOVED the entire experience.  He knew exactly what to do and carefully looked for red strawberries in the bushes.  He never seemed to get tired of it.  He likes to tell everyone we see that he put strawberries in his bucket.  Hannah liked it for about 30 minutes and then complained that she was too hot (it wasn't even 80 degrees).  We ended up filling 3 of our crates (which took a little over an hour).  Jack wanted to keep picking but the kids were done by then and I couldn't bend over to pick anymore with my big belly.

We went to have our strawberries weighed and were shocked when they weighed in at 17.5 pounds!  Good thing we didn't keep picking.  We went home and Jack helped me make freezer jam that night.  It turned out so great!  We have so many jars our freezer is full even after giving a few away.  I am guessing that we'll eat it all though.  Yum.