<p>We have wild raspberries around our cabin in the Maine mountains. Ymm! We pick strawberries locally. I have to say that living in Maine during the summer is hard to beat.</p>
<p>Our neighbor that share a back fence have chickens & now ducks as well.
They arent as noisy as their little kids.</p>
<p>Chickens have been a point of contention in our village council meetings. You can now have chickens, but you have to ask your neighbors first. A surprisingly small-town solution for a Chicago suburb. </p>
<p>So many people have chickens, but they don’t lay eggs forever,
You shouldn’t have chickens unless you can dispatch them yourself.
I have too much garden for chickens, but I have seen a yard designed so that the chicken run encircled the garden.
Kept it bug free!
My raspberries are descended from plants my grandmother brought from her farm in Missouri in the 1940’s
They grow really well in Seattle.</p>
<p>H used to pick blueberries for a local farm when he was ohh…maybe 13 or 14. The truck would come around to pick the kids up in the morning - it was this old rickety thing with wooden slats in the back. They’d all hop on and hang on tight to the back as it bounced its way up into the fields. It’s a wonder nobody fell off. I can’t even imagine that it would be legal (even THEN!!) They’d go up there, fill up the tins with the berries, work all day, and ride the same trucks back. </p>
<p>After a couple years of that he graduated to “working tobacco” - which is what all the teens used to do. The boys spent all day out under the tents working with the plants, and the girls worked in the barns “sewing” and hanging leaves. Yuck. You’d come home dirty, smelly, covered with “tar” and tobacco rash…</p>
<p>None of the local kids work tobacco anymore…I think that there are immigrant workers (yes! in CT) that do that now.</p>
<p>Back on topic…I LOVE to pick strawberries. Nothing tastes as good as a bowl of freshly picked berries with homemade whipped cream…it’s getting harder and harder to find PYO fields around here. So many years we end up with a wet soggy June and the crop is bad…</p>
<p>I picked blueberries as a young teen. Made enough in the season to pay for ski lift tickets in the winter (of course they were under$10 then…). It was hard work but much better than strawberries. You were within earshot of a dozen or more other teens but you couldn’t always see them, so lots of flirting and silly talk went on as well…</p>
<p>I recently read a piece (forget where now) about immigrant children working the tobacco fields and having reactions to chemical spraying etc. I believe this particular piece was about NC. The agricultural child labor laws apparently are more lax about kids working in potentially dangerous conditions . . . sad to me. De-tasseling corn, which is still a HS kid job, is a far cry from routine pesticide and herbicide exposure.</p>
<p>The link I posted originally, details that the crops are sprayed without the workers leaving the fields.
Makes me wonder what sort of chemicals I was exposed to, because even today, strawberries are a crop that you should always buy organic. In the 1970’s, we were even less concerned about chemical exposure. </p>
<p>hahahaha!!! Did I actually read it in your post and forgot?!</p>
<p>I picked strawberries for my uncle for several years. He had a truck farm and part of it was a couple of strawberry patches. He mostly had it a pick your own, but he did have a few customers who were little old ladies who couldn’t pick their own. They were willing to pay extra for him to pick them. He then had me pick them instead.</p>
<p>I didn’t really like the idea of picking strawberries at 6 am the first week of summer break, though I did like the money.</p>
<p>My grandmother on the other side had her own little strawberry patch, not enough to sell to anyone though more than she really needed. She always made strawberry jam and froze it instead of canning it. Whenever I came home from college for a weekend she would get out a jar of strawberry jam and send it back with me to have in my room. I was the most popular girl on the floor for a few days after that. She always used instant coffee jars to freeze it in. I sometimes wondered if I could taste the coffee through the strawberries, of course I didn’t.</p>
<p>I use beach strawberries for groundcover although I also plant the larger hybrids.
It would be hard to pick my favorite fruit though.
Probably between mangos & strawberries, and Im not likely to live anywhere I can grow mangoes.
I dont like it above 75f.</p>
<p>I used to go to pick strawberries with my grandmother when I was a kid, but these were for our consumption, not to earn money. They cost 30 cents a pound and I remember one time my grandmother told the owner of the patch, you should weigh her before and after! I guess I must’ve eaten a lot along the way, but they were so juicy and luscious. </p>
<p>When I picked them, we didnt eat them because that slows you down considerably.
Also they were pretty dirty.
I remember either because of the rain or overwatering, that they were swollen and not very tasty.
Strawberries in the markets now are much improved.
:)</p>
<p>My dream is a mango farm in HI. 
EK, you can come and visit and pick as much as you want. Tradewinds make 80 degrees in HI feel like 70 here. Nice… </p>
<p>When I spent a summer in Europe as an exchange student the family took me blueberry and currant picking on their land. I strayed from the group over to a hill and bent down to pick a few berries. A foot below my hand was a snake and it scurried away in a hurry. When I described the snake to the family, the father told me it was very poisonous. </p>
<p>Be careful. It’s a jungle out there. </p>
<p>Yikes! Fortunately PNW blueberries grow on tall bushes. It’s mostly stand-up work. And no poisonous snakes in western Washington. </p>
<p>Yup, only garter snakes. Still creep me out! </p>
<p>I went on a field trip with younger Ds class when she was a sophomore in high school.
For Marine biology. We went to soap lake, saw salt beds and hunted rattlesnakes & black widows.
( we also found marine fossils on Slate Peak)
My daughter was wearing flip flops. 
We did find the spider nests, but didnt find any alive.
It probably was too cold.
I was the only female chaperone & ended up sleeping in my car because I didnt have all the tent poles.
( public schools are more particular about mixed sex sharing than private schools)
The estimable Craig MacGowan was heading up the volunteers ( he was retired & the other volunteers were his rugby buddies). The instructor had been Mac’s student in high school.
It was a great trip, even if we didnt find any rattlesnakes.</p>