So I lived in Richmond, VA for most of my formative years, though I actually lived south of Richmond in Chesterfield County. Chesterfield County had a working farm called the Chesterfield Berry Farm, and most every year my mom would take me and my brother and sister to go pick strawberries on said farm.
Even when I moved away to Blacksburg, many years I went back around Mother’s Day to spend time with family and to go to this berry farm. I will share some of the wonderful pictures of the Berry Farm that I have.
While the picture says 2005, this is pretty typical of each year, notice the beautiful rows of strawberry plants, all big and healthy. Nice rows lined with straw. Huge strawberries just waiting to be picked, and plenty of them to fill our containers.
But this year when we went, apparently the farm had been passed on to the two sons and…well they don’t seem to have the same care as their parents.
I didn’t take more pictures because I was rather disgusted with the whole thing. Unlike past years, the wagon dropped us off, there was no one to direct which rows to go pick in to spread out the pickers, so everyone was just in the same area that had probably been picked over in past days as well. Weeds were abundant and huge, the plants themselves seemed to be struggling to even grow. The straw was old and rotting. There were beetles in almost all of the strawberries that had managed to ripen. And strawberries that hadn’t been good enough had been left to rot on the plants.
It did make me realize that there was probably a lot of work gone into the fields in past years to make them as beautiful as they were, but I can’t believe that the owners thought it was okay to send customers out into fields that they obviously didn’t care about. I would have much rather be told they were not opening fields for pickers this year than to have seen the fields in that state.
