Pick Your Own (PYO)
The temperamental weather in the UK has finally brought the sun back to indicate that summer is here. It seems that summer in this country starts later than anywhere else, probably not lasting for a long time. The weather seems bizarre lately as for the past few weeks, torrential rain brought floods to the Northern and Western part of the country. Now that the rain is gone, the weather was glorious on Saturday and Sunday! Brought the temperature to the highest record so far at 29/30 degrees Celsius.
I read an article in The Guardian newspaper a few weeks ago about the great outdoors ideas and it’s where I learned about PYO – Pick Your Own. I got really excited about this and I thought it was something new that I’ve never done in my life, which I should really try doing it once! Arnaud and I thought it was a great idea and that we should be outdoor since the weather was going to be great! A list of top 100 PYO farms were listed in this special article, covered each region in the UK. I was happy to see quite a number of the PYO farms that are located just outside of London, which is not far from where I am.
Before I started to pick one, I did some research to see where this PYO farm is and what they offer. I finally chose Garsons Farm, located in Esher, Surrey. Garsons Farm has been awarded the best PYO 2006/2007, and has more than 100 acres of fruits and vegetables to offer! As soon as we reached Garsons PYO, there was a sign showing the starting point of the route to pick your own. As different crops are planted in different locations, it’s advisable for all the PYO-ers to drive from one location to another. That’s what we did, else it would be too far to walk!
We started off picking some raspberries. Then, some blackcurrants. Moving on to strawberries, my favourite!! We were a bit disappointed as there were not many left to be picked. As we continued, I saw signs of potatoes, courgettes, spinach, carrots, beetroots, blueberries, more strawberries, apples.. etc.
It was very interesting to see some potatoes being freshly dug. I love this PYO idea. I couldn’t wait but started to collect the already dug potatoes (freshly from the ground) and put them into my carrier bag! We then moved on to carrots. We had to use digging fork to harvest our baby carrots, the experience was amazing as could never get any carrots fresher than these! Just beside where carrots were planted, there were spinach. Then, the next to it were courgettes!
Since we didn’t pick a lot of strawberries earlier, we went frenzy picking more juicy and big strawberries. Couldn’t believe that we picked more than 2kg of strawberries that didn’t cost even £8. Just before we left, we couldn’t resist but kept looking at the red apple trees that lined up so neatly not too far from strawberries field. We decided to take some of them home with us!
After spending more than 3 hours at the farm under the sun, we were happy to go home with our hand-picked fruits and vegetables.
