We woke up bright and early this morning (5AM) to go pick some mulberries with our buddy Dan on his friend’s farm. Today is the farmer’s market in the ‘big town’, Chestertown and our berries are on the docket to be sold.

Dan drove in his little Jeep, dubbed Rocky, and we pulled up to a very long stretch of less-than-stellar gravel. There were heaps of random garbage and random animals roaming all over the place. Not the cleanest spot of land but definitely full of natury-goodness. The mulberries were not quite ripe this morning, so farmer Earl told us we should pick blackberries instead.

We drove out to the berries, and farmer Earl pointed us in the general direction we needed to be. His dog, Dori helped scout the way and even picked berries herself, although her berries ended up in her belly. Still she was a super cute distraction for us.

We spent a good hour or so foraging our way through spider-and-centipede-ridden plants to pick our berries…I bailed after I almost touched 2 wolf-spiders, but soon dubbed myself the supervisor; delegating where the best berries could be picked. Jake, Dan and Dori went in the thick of it, unafraid of the little critters. In the end we (they) got 11 baskets of berries.

Before we left, we took a short walk to visit the farm animals, because they were so cute. Pigs, geese, goats, cows & calves, chickens & roosters were all running around like mad. It was crazy but fun all the same.

Farmer Earl was planning to sell our berries in town for $4 a basket and offered to split the profit. Totally reasonable for a basket of freshly-picked organic blackberries. I mean it doesn’t get much fresher than that! So if we do well, we will have some solid beer money at our disposal! And after the excruciatingly hot and humid day it looks like we are about to have, we couldn’t ask for anything better.