Jan 5

Jan 5 PYO Strawberries

It is finally strawberry picking season! And to make things better, I think I finally found the best way to have the full strawberry picking experience in Auckland. (PYO stands for Pick Your Own, btw.) The kids and I drove out to Sweet Red just outside of Helensville this morning. Their claim to fame is that they have “The World’s Best Strawberries” and clearly with that tagline, they were worth checking out. We’ve been to a few other strawberry picking spots just west of town, but hadn’t ventured to Sweet Red as it is a little bit further than some of the others.

First off, this place is huge! There are 20 massive strawberry patches, and the ladies at the check in office were sure to recommend a few spots that were particularly full of fruit when we arrived. I also liked how this place felt like a real farm. I mean, it is a real farm at 40ha in size, but instead of being right next to a busy road, it was tucked down a dirt road and then down a hill. Instead of hearing cars rush by, we heard cows mooing in a nearby paddock.

I’m don’t think I’m qualified to definitively say if these were the world’s best strawberries or not, but I can confirm that all of the fruit that I surreptitiously snacked on while helping the kids fill their baskets were delicious. We had no problem finding lots of ripe berries to drop in the baskets that we picked up from the makeshift container office on the edge of the patches. Before long, the kids were hot - there is no shade so hats and sunscreen are a must! - and I knew we had more than enough strawberries for our family. Chances are some of these would go bad before we had a chance to eat them, so we schlepped back to the office where they weighed our haul. Shockingly, we had just under 2 kgs of strawberries. It looked like a lot more! When we picked up our baskets from the very helpful and chatty ladies working the register, they said each one holds about 6 kgs total, so a full basket would cost around NZ$48. (That breaks down to about US$1.29 per pound.) I added 3 punnets of blueberries to our haul, and we walked away with a NZ$25 bill.

Sweet Red was a hit! But after all of that picking in the sun, we were hot and in need of ice cream. Some of the other spots we’d gone to had on-site fresh fruit ice cream, but this one was pure picking. Fortunately, just down the road back towards Auckland in Kumeu is another strawberry picking spot with ice cream - Phil Greig’s Strawberry Garden. This place is a small, singular patch staffed by some disinterested and slightly cranky teenagers right next to a busy road and more expensive with admission starting at NZ$8.50 per adult and first kg of strawberries and each kg of strawberries $NZ8.50 after that. But they make their own fresh fruit ice cream, and it is delicious! If I had really young kids and wanted a short drive and a small patch experience, this would probably be the best stop, but for older kids who want more of a challenge, I think the combination of both Sweet Red and Phil Greig’s is the way to go.