Jackie Q.
Yelp
Berry season totally snuck up on me this year and I just barely made it out to my go-to farm back home for the first strawberries of the season before leaving for Texas. California is known for it's fruit production, and while everyone might swear by Carlsbad for the absolute best, NorCal isn't too far behind. I was surprised to find that there was strawberry picking at all out in these parts, but when I found this spot and saw the reviews I figured it would at least be worth a shot.
Little did I know what I would be in for. When we pulled into the parking lot, the farm looked very small. As we walked up to the welcome booth, I realized that it only looked small because the land is flat. Originally I just wanted to go for the sunflowers because I didn't have too much faith that there would be any strawberries left, but we paid admission, took up a box, and headed into the strawberry fields to see what we could find.
The nice lady at the welcome booth informed us that the strawberries would be slim pickings and that they just had a very wet season, but what I didn't expect that to mean was that the ends of every row would have a half foot of thick mud for me to maneuver around. I quickly ended up caking both of my sneakers fully in mud, so I am not kidding when I recommend bringing the rain boots. The strawberries are definitely smaller than what they were back home, and a lot of the plants had swarms of fruit flies so you'll know which areas to avoid. After about a half hour of hoping we wouldn't fall into the mud, we finally made away with a little over three pounds of strawberries.
After concluding our strawberry hunt, we headed into the sunflower fields. The sunflowers were very pretty but most of them didn't have that dark black center that looks the most aesthetically pleasing, so we didn't take any stems to go. The sunflower field was much less muddy than the strawberry ones, but there were definitely still some areas that made me sink into the ground. Don't be surprised to receive a good number of bug bites from this excursion, it would've been a good idea to bring the bug spray.
After we finished at the sunflower field, we did a couple more rows of the other strawberry field next to it. There are three strawberry fields in total and the two that we went into seemed on par with each other in terms of muddiness and strawberry quality. We wanted to check out the gift shop but it was closed, so we went to weigh our berries, picked up a strawberry popsicle, got a plastic bag for our muddy shoes (they didn't have a hose), and hopped in the car to head home.
The strawberry popsicle is made with the farm strawberries and was very refreshing, the strawberries themselves tasted good once we washed them up later that same day and the next day. The price per pound here is greater than the price I paid back home, and considering that you have to pay the sunflower entry fee to get in (I believe even if you only want to go for strawberries) makes this a pay for the one-time experience in my book. We got very muddy, a lot of bug bites, and almost ended up sunburnt. Although it's not the experience I expected, I still had lots of fun.