While I clearly remember picking blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries as a kid, as well as trooping out to the nearest orchard and picking apples, I don’t have any real childhood memories of picking strawberries aside from the occasional wild strawberries growing in the yard. My mother is deeply realistic about the kinds of activities that small children might enjoy (and has a healthy skepticism about outdoorsy manual labor masquerading as leisure activity), but my Dad is not. My dad used to take us camping on an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine with with no place to dock and no means of communicating with the mainland. A fisherman named Clyde with a Maine accent so thick I could not understand him would drop us off and we would wade in to the rocky shore with our fresh water in big plastic jugs and then clear the path to the campground. But even my dad seemed to know that strawberry picking was not a good time.

I last went strawberry picking a few years ago. I was living in Boston, and had joined a CSA for a farm that was based in western Mass, about an hour and a half away (they had a drop-off right on my way home from work). They offered pick-your-own strawberries at the farm, and if you were part of the Boston pick-up, you could go out and pick your whole allotment at one time. It was something like six quarts.

So on a relatively cool but sunny day, my best friend and I loaded into the car and trooped out. (I was sharing the CSA with Dave and my mum, but both opted out of the strawberry picking.)

We drove up to the farm, which was beautiful with the sun shining brilliantly, and we started picking our strawberries. Strawberry bushes are low, about six inches off the ground, and the strawberries are hidden under the leaves for the most part. So you have to get yourself quite low to the ground, either in a squat or kneel or folded over in some way. And while June in New England seems like a pretty mild time of year, the sun does beat down quite strongly in the middle of an unshaded field.

Siobhan and I do have actual skills, but strawberry picking is not one of them. It took about ten minutes before I was sweaty, then another ten before the sweat building up behind my knees became uncomfortable, and then my back started hurting, and then I would try to wipe the sweat and sunscreen off my forehead with my forearm, but my forearm got too sweaty and sunscreen-y to be effective. But we’re stubborn people, and we had driven an hour and a half, and we were going to pick our strawberries. I would falter and suggest maybe we should stop at 4 quarts and Siobhan would say, no, I think we can do this, let’s just power through. God bless her, we did.

I left with a sunburn on my lower back the remains of which could still be seen years later, six quarts of strawberries, and a deep and profound respect for both fruit pickers and the high price of strawberries at the farmer’s market. I am unequivocally not cut out for that work.

So when A. suggest that this month’s O-Rama posts be focused on strawberries I had the wherewithal to reject my gut inclination to go picking strawberries. In theory, I want to pick strawberries. In real life, I want to do leisure activities that do not require me to labor in unrelenting sun, stooped to the ground with sunscreen dripping into my eyes for extended periods of time.

Instead, I did what people who want to pick strawberries in theory but not in practice these days do. I went to the farmer’s market.

We have a great farmer’s market here in Portland. According to the Portland Maine Farmer’s Market website, the first Portland farmer’s market started in 1768, which makes it one of the country’s oldest markets (“provisions were carried into town in large leather saddlebags or paniers on horses backs”). After bouncing around a number of different locations in the intervening 243 years, it’s currently settled in to Monument Square on Wednesdays and Deering Oaks Park on Saturdays.* Last year, Travel + Leisure named it one of America’s Best Farmer’s Markets. More than 30 farms show up, as well as what appears to be a large portion of the local population, including just about every single pregnant woman or couple with an infant in the region. If you can handle the slow walking, it’s a pretty life-affirming experience.

I was looking for two things: strawberries, and the Old Ocean House Farm stand.

I spent an incredibly long time standing here waiting til there weren’t people walking by to get this photo.

I found Old Ocean House Farm first. David Buchanan (of Origins Fruit) is the farmer and horticulturalist at Old Ocean House, and does quite a bit of work to preserve and support heritage foods, including strawberries. I’m going to be talking to him later this week (so excited! I’m going to have real newsy content here!), but in the meantime, I wanted to try their strawberry smoothies.

The smoothie of my dreams, for $3.

The strawberry smoothies are amazing. Really. I’m sort of judgmental about prepared foods at farmer’s markets (I’m sort of judgmental at farmer’s markets period, actually, but also about prepared foods), but I want to drink one of those smoothies every day. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

And then I found strawberries at Tom’s Honey and More.

They were wonderful. And I didn’t have to pick them myself. I just took them home, washed them, stemmed them, and sliced them onto big bowl of vanilla ice cream. And that right there is the best recipe I have for fresh, delicious, Maine strawberries.

The first photo is from the LIFE photo archive (click on the picture for a link). I took the rest of the photos last Saturday at the Portland Maine Farmer’s Market in Deering Oaks Park.

* In the winter, it moves indoors, last year to the Maine Irish Heritage Center.