Well, we decided that the price was a bit higher than we wanted to pay for berries to cook down and can so Sandra decided that she wanted to try another U-Pick adventure. We located a farm about a 10 minute drive from the house and started out this morning loaded with empty boxes for our haul. When we arrived we noted that there were workers picking in one of the fields.
They were loading small buckets with berries and dumping them into large barrels.
They were "stripping" the plants of all mature berries, ripe or not. The filled barrels were then transported to a warehouse to await transport to a plant making jam and other strawberry products.
Well, enough of that, Sandra wanted to get down to business so we staked out a row and started picking. The plants were full, some berries already over-ripe. The plants grow close to the ground so you had to bend over or squat down to reach them.
After about an hour we had all had enough and decided that U-Pick was not the best way to get strawberries even if the price was about half that of already picked berries. We gathered about 18 pounds during that hour's time.
We were accompanied by some friends from Taiwan and their kids. The two girls really took to the picking, being very selective and only getting the perfect berries.
In fact they enjoyed it so much we are thinking about hosting a group of kids from Taiwan next summer to experience the joy of living in the Pacific Northwest.Next come blueberries, blackberries, marion berries, raspberries, logan berries, and a lot of other goodies. Be patient, they're not ripe yet.
The English name comes from Paeon or Paean, a student of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing. Supposedly Asclepius became jealous of his pupil; Zeus saved Paeon from the wrath of Asclepius by turning him into the peony flower. Tree peony (Mudan) and herbaceous peony (Shaoyao) are placed in the same genus and family. The leaves and flowers are similar, but the former is an arboreal plant with a permanent woody branch structure, while the latter is a perennial herbaceous plant with new growth each year from ground level. Tree peony and herbaceous peony both are beautiful and charming flowers and have prestigious reign in the flower world. The tree peony is known as "the King of flowers", whereas herbaceous peony is called "the Queen of flowers". 
Tree peony has been the favorite flower from the imperial rulers down to the common man for more than 1500 years in Chinese history, whereas the cultivation history of Chinese herbaceous peony can go back to 2500 years ago. During the Tang Dynasty (618A.D.-907A.D.), Empress Wu Ze Tian and Princess Tai Ping were supposedly drinking in the Imperial Flower Garden and admiring the snow when they were greeted by the fragrance of flowers; it was the aroma of wintersweet, which was in bloom. Empress Wu Ze Tian rewarded the wintersweet but to her disappointment, she found only wintersweet, winter jasmine, and narcissus blooming in the garden. She wrote a poem and sent it to the god in charge of flowers, which read “Tomorrow I’ll visit the garden; let me know that spring has come. All flowers are to bloom tonight; don’t wait for the spring breeze to blow.” The next morning, hundreds of flowers bloomed and the garden was full of Springtime. But the tree peonies stubbornly disobeyed the order and refused to bloom. 
It sprouted and produced six stems, one with a flower bud. We should have cut the bud off to allow the plant to grow another year but we couldn’t wait to see what it looked like. 
The bud never fully opened. 
The grounds are open to the public from May 1st through June 15th; the remainder of the time they are concentrating on growing flowers for exhibits and for sale to the public. The Adelmans have taken Best of Show awards for six of the last eight years at the American Peony Society’s annual competition.
They cultivate both tree peony and herbaceous peony as well as an intersectional peony which is a cross of the two.
but the majority of their business is the sale of root sections with eyes that are planted in the fall and will produce blooms the following spring.
I was surprised to see peonies in almost every color except blue (that’s the grower’s dream color). 
Groups of flowers
Fields stretched as far as you wanted to walk
