Strawberry season

Boris had been working hard on the farm this week and today he was outside at dawn to get an early start before the day grew too hot for work.  It was strawberry season, the first sweet few weeks of early summer.  This morning he gathered the yearling cubs, and the students who where in his summer semester botany and forestry classes, and led them all out to the strawberry fields for a morning of picking.

The group started in the cultivated strawberry patch, there grew the large cat paw size strawberries that would be sent to Loupe Falls for the annual Strawberry Festival at the end of the week.  When all of the ripe berries were picked from this area they moved on to the wild strawberry patch. Here were the tiny berries that made the best jams and sauce.  Boris planned to start processing some this afternoon, they were a key part of his sweets business and he had customers waiting for the first batch.

Once the group finished with the picking fields, they moved on to the foraging fields and had their own feast of strawberries for lunch.  After eating, the three yearling cubs headed to the river for a swim and the Temperate Biome University students carried the strawberries back to the barns for processing.

Boris gathered up two large baskets of wild strawberries and with his students, headed into his house to start a batch of jam.