To Berry or Not to Berry
I've been trying to take Piper berry-picking, but have had no success. I can't find a friggin' place to do it.
If you drive a few miles out from our house, there are lots of fields. There's got to be a damned berry farm in there somewhere. I know I missed strawberries this year - by the time I realized that it's hotter here so the season starts earlier than in the North, they were gone - but I thought surely I could catch blueberries or, failing that, peaches and apples. There is one berry farm a few miles from our house, but according to their signs, all they do is strawberries in late May. I can't tell if they do any sort of other fun stuff because their website sucks and they weren't in our phone book.
One of my biggest ongoing complaints about life here is that nobody knows how to build and run a decent, simple, informative website. NOBODY. I can't think of a single business in this area whose website has actually been useful for anything other than finding their address (and sometimes, not even then). I can think of at least three parenting magazines that operate out of the Charlotte area, and their sites all blow, too. I thought maybe one of them would have a list of local u-pick berry farms, but no. I did try. I tried very, very hard. Two days of banging my head against the keyboard and all I got was...two days of banging my head against the keyboard. A couple of them had listings of "Things to Do" or "Day Trips," but they're either in alphabetical order (not fucking helpful if you don't know what you're looking for) or listed by county (not fucking helpful if you don't know where you're going, where "Randomtownname" is, or don't want to drive four hours). The few helpful listings I did find for farms or berry farms all had problems: broken links, links to sites that haven't been updated since 2006 (not kidding), links to equally-unhelpful only-partially-accessible articles in the local paper, whose site also sucks.
This is not the first time I've had this sort of frustration. Trying to find a fun place to buy a Halloween pumpkin is migraine-inducing every year. Our first year here, I don't even remember how we found it (it was either 'we were out for a drive and stumbled on it' or the electronic equivalent of flailing my arms around Google until I caught something), but we wound up all the way out in Mooresville, about 35 miles away. That farm was not particularly fun. It was $7 per person for a "hayride" (flatbed of hay bales, pulled slowly by a tractor for less than a mile) to a "petting zoo" (tiny pen of mostly un-pettable animals and one very pissed-off looking turkey) and then out to "pick your own pumpkin" (pumpkins scattered randomly in what may have once been a patch, but the complete absence of vines made me wonder if they'd trucked them in). We got a 5-oz Dixie cup of cider at the end of our adventure.
Last year, I think I did more Google-flailing (after 30 fruitless minutes with the phonebook, actually) and found more lists of broken links and outdated Web sites, until I was literally in tears, hunched over my keyboard sobbing "I just want to take Piper out to get a pumpkin. I just want to do something fun! All I wanted was for us to have some fun as a family!" Ryan gently suggested that maybe we could just pack some water and snacks and drive out to one of the addresses, if we get a pumpkin that's great and if it's a bust at least we get out of the house for a while.
We wound up at Hodges Farm on the NE edge of town, and it was really fun. They had a corn maze, popcorn, you could wander around the farm and look at animals, pick a pumpkin, and we bought some delicious grass-fed beef from their storefront. I was hoping they would have berries or, hell, I'd even take tomatoes at this point, but no dice. People from Hodges were at the Hummingbird Festival I took Piper to on Saturday (at which we did not see even one tiny hummingbird, but that's another story) because the Festival was close to their farm. They were talking up their pumpkin patch stuff, which starts October 1. But no berries.
I am so bummed, because I thought she'd love it - we certainly did when we were kids. At this point I am so frustrated and disappointed that the best I can do is put the idea on a shelf until next spring and then make sure to get out to somewhere during strawberry season.
If you drive a few miles out from our house, there are lots of fields. There's got to be a damned berry farm in there somewhere. I know I missed strawberries this year - by the time I realized that it's hotter here so the season starts earlier than in the North, they were gone - but I thought surely I could catch blueberries or, failing that, peaches and apples. There is one berry farm a few miles from our house, but according to their signs, all they do is strawberries in late May. I can't tell if they do any sort of other fun stuff because their website sucks and they weren't in our phone book.
One of my biggest ongoing complaints about life here is that nobody knows how to build and run a decent, simple, informative website. NOBODY. I can't think of a single business in this area whose website has actually been useful for anything other than finding their address (and sometimes, not even then). I can think of at least three parenting magazines that operate out of the Charlotte area, and their sites all blow, too. I thought maybe one of them would have a list of local u-pick berry farms, but no. I did try. I tried very, very hard. Two days of banging my head against the keyboard and all I got was...two days of banging my head against the keyboard. A couple of them had listings of "Things to Do" or "Day Trips," but they're either in alphabetical order (not fucking helpful if you don't know what you're looking for) or listed by county (not fucking helpful if you don't know where you're going, where "Randomtownname" is, or don't want to drive four hours). The few helpful listings I did find for farms or berry farms all had problems: broken links, links to sites that haven't been updated since 2006 (not kidding), links to equally-unhelpful only-partially-accessible articles in the local paper, whose site also sucks.
This is not the first time I've had this sort of frustration. Trying to find a fun place to buy a Halloween pumpkin is migraine-inducing every year. Our first year here, I don't even remember how we found it (it was either 'we were out for a drive and stumbled on it' or the electronic equivalent of flailing my arms around Google until I caught something), but we wound up all the way out in Mooresville, about 35 miles away. That farm was not particularly fun. It was $7 per person for a "hayride" (flatbed of hay bales, pulled slowly by a tractor for less than a mile) to a "petting zoo" (tiny pen of mostly un-pettable animals and one very pissed-off looking turkey) and then out to "pick your own pumpkin" (pumpkins scattered randomly in what may have once been a patch, but the complete absence of vines made me wonder if they'd trucked them in). We got a 5-oz Dixie cup of cider at the end of our adventure.
Last year, I think I did more Google-flailing (after 30 fruitless minutes with the phonebook, actually) and found more lists of broken links and outdated Web sites, until I was literally in tears, hunched over my keyboard sobbing "I just want to take Piper out to get a pumpkin. I just want to do something fun! All I wanted was for us to have some fun as a family!" Ryan gently suggested that maybe we could just pack some water and snacks and drive out to one of the addresses, if we get a pumpkin that's great and if it's a bust at least we get out of the house for a while.
We wound up at Hodges Farm on the NE edge of town, and it was really fun. They had a corn maze, popcorn, you could wander around the farm and look at animals, pick a pumpkin, and we bought some delicious grass-fed beef from their storefront. I was hoping they would have berries or, hell, I'd even take tomatoes at this point, but no dice. People from Hodges were at the Hummingbird Festival I took Piper to on Saturday (at which we did not see even one tiny hummingbird, but that's another story) because the Festival was close to their farm. They were talking up their pumpkin patch stuff, which starts October 1. But no berries.
I am so bummed, because I thought she'd love it - we certainly did when we were kids. At this point I am so frustrated and disappointed that the best I can do is put the idea on a shelf until next spring and then make sure to get out to somewhere during strawberry season.