When we arrived, the weather was lovely and warm, so the first thing we did was to walk over to the refreshment stand to get something to cool us down.

The stand had enticing, home-made baked goods supplied by local bakeries, and of course strawberries too, but we opted to refresh ourselves with a delicious strawberry lemonade.

Wandering around, we also noticed that, in the area where you go to weigh your freshly picked goodies, there was a little shop selling eggs, fruit and veg, jams, Suffolk Meadow ice cream and juices by Maynard House. When we go back, we’ll definitely pick up some groceries!

After perusing the shop, it was time to do some strawberry picking! McLauchlans offer a ‘Pick Your Own’ scheme, so once a staff member had kindly guided us to the back of the farm where there was easy picking, we started filling our baskets.

As it was only the second day of

the picking season, a lot of the ‘Favor’ variety strawberries hadn’t ripened yet.

You need to pick ones that are as red as possible (with minimal whiteness) because strawberries don’t ripen once picked, but

instead go soft and deteriorate.

We were successful in our strawberry picking expedition

– we ended up picking 1.3kg of strawberries, and it only cost us £9.00!

Of course, being fruit lovers, we started tucking in to the strawberries as soon as we finished picking. Although some hadn’t fully ripened due to it being so early in the season, most of them were juicy, delicious, and sweet.

We can’t wait to go back in the summer and pick more strawberries, as well as lots of

other fruits!

During the British growing season, we’ll offer the finest quality strawberries from local growers

and prestigious farms across the UK. Once the season has ended, we plan to offer delicious French, Spanish, and Belgian strawberries!

Although one of the team told us that, with a few more days of sunshine, lots more strawberries would be ripe and ready to pick,

we had to spend some time rummaging around to find the

best strawberries.

We looked for the ones with the deepest red colour (which are sometimes hard to find because pests often get there before you!)

The top tip I learned whilst searching for strawberries was don’t pick with your sunglasses on because you can’t accurately judge the colour of the strawberries!

Although we don’t currently sell strawberries on our website, they will soon be available to buy from The Greengrocer!