Pick Your Own

I used to go to farms to pick strawberries regularly throughout the Summer when I was young. I grew up in Essex where I have a memory of loads of PYO choices, and given that this was pre-internet, when Steve Jobs was barely out of nappies (that is an exaggeration as Steve Jobs was older than me, but you get the comparative picture right?), choices for family entertainment on a Sunday afternoon looked very different back in the day. My family used to bundle us in the car and head to Southend, or to a stately home (I LOATHED the stately homes, as any tomboy girl might, but absolutely loved the bit where we pitched camp in the grounds, played cricket and stuffed ourselves with sandwiches). And PYO was another of those activities. We would bring back ridiculous mountains of strawberries and my poor Mum would then spend the remainder of the day making months and monthsworth of jam out of it. She claimed she enjoyed it. I'll take her at her word. I left Essex when I went to university and never came back except for family visits. I settled in another part of London, had my kids, and totally forgot about PYO. A few times we would be in the car in Suffolk, Somerset or Devon and see a PYO sign, exclaim to each other, and proceed to drive past it. But this week it is the school Summer hols, one of my kids is in Wales at a Summer camp dressing up in togas and playing war games with paintball if the Twitter pictures are a reliable guide to his activities, leaving my other kid at home with me. On a whim I googled PYO to see if there were any nearby and discovered one a 20 minute drive away. So we hopped in the car and pitched up at a massive farm with acres and acres of fruit and vegetables. So huge was this place that we lost ourselves in the raspberry canes, emerging hours later with suspiciously pink looking mouths. In spite of my early memories and my silent exhortations to keep it all in proportion I did what everyone does when they go to a PYO, which is, to have a kind of brainstorm and go completely nuts with the gathering baskets. An hour or so later we had about a year's worth of blackberries, raspberries and strawberries to weigh and pay. I wanted redcurrants but we didn't have the space for them. I thought we might make it to the sweetcorn fields and carry back one under each arm. That's how obsessive I got. What is it about PYO that does this to you? And, a bit like when you buy souvenirs on holiday that look so great in their natural surroundings, or that dress you saw in the window and went so mad for you didn't bother to try it on, you just ran in and bought it and brought it home covetously, we unloaded our fruit mountain on to the kitchen surface, where it looked, well, like a mountain of fruit we were going to have to find a place for. Ah but if you are an afficionado of PYO you will know that there is so much more fun to be had out of your overspecified fruit gathering than mere JAM! I rolled up my sleeves, stuck Kiss FM on the radio very loudly, and set about pulling out my baking implements, my flour, sugar and butter, and I was off. First , an Eton Mess, creamy and sparkly and pink with strawberry juice from our warm, ripe strawberries that I whizzed in the food processor, chopping up another load roughly, combining the lot with my whipped cream and homemade vanilla meringues. I contemplated an addition of alcohol and decided this fruit was so yummy and beautiful it needed to be left to speak for itself. Next a raspberry pound cake, studded with raspberries so huge they looked like pink spaceships. Then a blackberry and apple tart, 9 tenths blackberries culled from our haul. And finally the best bit. Freezer bags, into which went the tautest and plumpest of our fruit, washed and hulled. Zip the bag almost shut. Put a straw in. Suck all the air out to create a vaccuum pack. Zip the remainder shut and chuck in the freezer. That is if you manage to do the sucking bit without laughing yourself silly, as my child and I did so often we ended up accidentally mashing half our fruit (which then became smoothie fodder). Pick Your Own. It carries a wealth of possibilities. I am going back there right now for the sweetcorn.