Farmer Mark Gingerich says if you want the biggest strawberries, go to Walmart. But if you want the freshest, sweetest basket of fruit, pick your own.
“I’m a big proponent of agency,” he said. “If you put in the effort to pick your own strawberries, there’s something rewarding about that.”
Mark and his wife, Katrina, own and operate The Berry Basket Farm, a U-pick strawberry patch in rural Iowa City. They opened to the public just a few years ago.
“People who came out were grateful for the opportunity to spend the day at the farm, spend time outdoors and take home the fruits of their labor,” Mark said.
Demand has continued to grow alongside the patch, but the berry picking season is short: about three weeks from early- to mid-June through early July. Customers can bring the whole family, as well as their own container to carry their harvest and cash, check or card to pay. Sign up for the farm’s email list to receive word when harvest time comes.
The strawberry patch is located within Mark’s parents’ larger traditional row crop farm, on land that had historically grown corn and beans. During the “off-season” Kristina has a job in town and Mark helps farm his father’s land in addition to substitute teaching and freelance photography and website work.
“This pick-your-own strawberry thing has kind of been a family story,” Mark said.
Mark’s parents, in the 1970s, came home to the family farm and discovered that the rowcrop income wasn’t enough to sustain them in addition to the generation before them. Mark’s parents themselves ran a small berry patch on the land for a few years before moving to Washington, Iowa, where Mark was born.
Later in life, Mark and Katrina moved back on the original family land and again, found that the row crop income alone couldn’t support two generations of farmers alone. Mark says he is grateful that his parents agreed to convert some of their land to a berry patch, and that Katrina has supported the project.
In addition to proving economically helpful, Mark says the U-pick berry patch has added a much-appreciated sense of community to the often isolated work of traditional farming.
“I’m very much a people person,” he said. “I’d rather be out there helping someone, filling their bucket with them.”