It’s PYO strawberry picking season! Thankfully as the pandemic lockdown restrictions are easing more ‘days out’ locations are opening up. Yesterday, to make the most of the beautiful weather I drove over to Manor Fruit Farm in Hints, Staffordshire with the boys to pick our own strawberries.

Pre-booking is essential

Before driving to the farm, you need to pre-book a time slot using their online booking system. It’s very easy to use. You pick a day, select a time slot and you need to buy a ticket per person entering the field, the tickets are £2 each. Children under 2 are free but they need to be strapped into a pushchair. My two year old would not be happy with that arrangement so I paid for all three of us to enter the field.

Let’s go strawberry picking

As you arrive at the farm, there are plenty of signs to direct you where to go. We drove into the car park and parked the car. There was plenty of room for social distancing which was a relief. For crowd control, they ask you to arrive no more than 10 minutes before your allotted time or 10 minutes after. You need to show your pre-booked tickets at the desk and there you can buy your punnets or buckets for filling in the field. We paid by contactless as cash is not accepted.

1 punnet costs £6 and is approximately 1kg in weight when filled.
1 bucket costs £12 and is approximately 2kg once filled.

Before entering the field, you’re asked to sanitise your hands using the provided sanitising gels and then a member of staff calls you into the field and shows you which strawberry lane is yours for picking. No other families will use your lane but you need to be mindful of other families around you.

The lane is quite long and we had no problems at all filling our punnets with big juicy strawberries. You are allowed an hour to walk around the field and fill your punnets however, we had managed to fill our punnets as we had reached half way so there is plenty of fruit to go around. It’s a one-way system around the field so you won’t bump into other families and I was pleased to see social distancing being observed around the field.

Wash your fruit before eating it!

Due to current guidelines, it’s advised not to eat the fruit as you walk around the field. I told the boys to try and hold off on eating any of the fruit whilst they were picking it and to my surprise, they didn’t eat any!

There are no toilets open and the cafe isn’t open for service so you can’t purchase any snacks or drinks.

We had a really lovely morning at Manor Farm Fruits and the strawberries we picked were delicious. If you’re anxious about visiting the farm with the current restrictions, I hope we can reassure you that there’s lots of measures in place and we had a lovely, safe time.

You can pre-book your admission tickets for Manor Farm Fruits PYO here https://manorfarmfruits.co.uk/pick-your-own/

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