Strawberry Picking in Japan

Finish this sentence: When I think strawberry picking I think of...                                       .

Ok, so when I think of strawberry picking I think of hot summer days in New England with the sun blazing down on you while you kneel down in the dirt and put mountains of strawberries into a basket and you take it home and make something yummy.... this is how I grew up strawberry picking!

So..... strawberry picking here in Japan is a little different... first of all the strawberries taste like a little slice of heaven! Strawberry season here is from December to May and they are all grown in greenhouses in raised beds. So yesterday I went strawberry picking with a great group of ladies who also love to explore and do new things here in Japan! We took the train a few stops down to an area with lots of farms! From the train station there was shuttle van to the strawberry farm. Once we got to the strawberry farm (which also has oranges, melons, and sweet potatoes throughout the year) we paid 1500 Yen (roughly $15) at the front and got a ticket. We then walked to one of the greenhouses and handed in our ticket... this began the 30 minutes of all you can EAT!!!!!

Please note the rules for strawberry picking....

Yes, you read that correctly ladies and gentlemen... all you can EAT! They give you a little plastic container where you can put the tops, and they also give you some condensed milk for you to dip the strawberries in. At first I was thinking that I like my strawberries straight up, but a little bit of the condensed milk was the perfect balance with the sweetness of the strawberries! All of the rows are raised so there is no bending down, no getting dirt on your knees... brilliant! There were 2 different kinds of strawberries in this greenhouse, one was sweet and so delicious and the other one was soft (sort of mushy almost) and not quite as sweet. I stuck around the sweet row since those were better! 30 minutes went by pretty quickly and I have no idea how many I ate, but I had quite a belly ache when I walked out of the greenhouse and was full for most of the afternoon! I forgot to mention all the bees flying around in the greenhouse... that was slightly unsettling so I tried to steer clear of them!

After leaving the strawberry farm we took the train further down to check out some gardens and to see if the cherry blossoms were in bloom yet... ALMOST!!! It was a nice walk through all of the garden and some of the cherry blossoms are just about ready to pop! It was a cool day, but the sun was shining down and had great company. At one point around the gardens there was a little pond with a bunch of Japanese men standing around this one corner with really fancy cameras (they looked like the paparazzi)... so we made our way down towards them and they were bird-watching... there was a bird called a Kingfisher that is really tiny and almost impossible to see in the bushes around the pond. They were all excited about it, I guess it is an almost endangered bird. One of the men there showed us a picture of it and up close it was beautiful with bright blue and orange colors!  On our walk back we came across fields and fields of daikon (Japanese radish) which is an extremely popular vegetable here... I'm not a huge fan but I need to learn different ways of cooking it!

Great day and hopefully I will be able to bring Damian strawberry picking (eating) before we leave Japan...

Japanese Word of the Day:

Inside the greenhouse!!!

Ichigo (ee-chee-go): Strawberry