Farm-fresh berries ready to pick at Gladstone farm

GLADSTONE, Mich. (WLUC) - Farm-fresh strawberries are ripe and ready to pick in Delta County, and they won’t be around for long.

After one short tractor ride, you can get to large fields of fresh strawberries at The Gladstone Berry Farm. The farm had to close Wednesday temporarily, but Farm Manager Parker Grzybowski said it was for a good reason.

“We just had a sheer volume of people was enough to get picked over so we had to close that so we could have more berries ripened. It’s nice to see, it’s a really good thing to see,” Grzybowski said.

The farm reopened Thursday morning and Grzybowski estimates that the number of berries sold Thursday could be well over 500 pounds. A lot of planning goes into making these fields plentiful with berries. But Grzybowski said one thing could either help or hinder plans for the season.

“Weather, I would say the weather is the hardest thing to plan for because the weather is unpredictable, whereas the stuff you can more predict like I have to go out and fertilize or weed,” he said.

Despite the rainy start in the morning, people still came out to pick. Grzybowski said it isn’t just locals coming out to the fields.

“They are from all over the U.P., we’ve had people from Houghton, Sault Ste. Marie before, it’s a highly anticipated thing, everybody watches for it,” he said.

If you are interested in visiting in the next few days there is one key thing to plan for.

“This season you’re going to want to look at getting out here earlier this year we seem to have our fields fill up right away at 8:00 a.m.,” said Grzybowski. “If you want your berries make sure that you get here before opening that way you can line up for picking.”

Grzybowski says you only have about two and a half weeks left for this season to collect strawberries but could change depending on the weather.

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