Get thee to a farm

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I have gone apple picking every fall since as long as I remember. I find it to be the perfect activity on a lovely fall day. We just head out of the city to spend a day in the fresh air and sunshine, getting some exercise, maybe having a picnic and picking a huge bag of apples for much less than you'd pay at a supermarket. Then you come back home with all these fresh yummy apples - to pack in your lunch, make apple crisp, apple sauce, apple butter and so much more.

Last year we were able to add another element to that apple-picking outing - pumpkin and squash picking! We spent a lovely afternoon not far from downtown at Quinn Farm in l'Île-Perrot, a great little farm that offers U-Pick options year round. With a hay-ride out to the fields, hay-bale maze and other fun stuff, it's also a great place to bring the little ones. So along with our usual gigantic bag of apples we came home with variety of goodies: a pumpkin perfect for Halloween carving, a neat white skinned pumpkin, a bunch of butternut (my favourite!) and other squashes, some little ornamental pumpkins, not to mention honey and other goodies from the farm store.

And yes, as a big "Peanuts" fan  I could not help myself from making the obligatory "Great Pumpkin" jokes. ;)

Perhaps I'm bound to romanticize farms, as I do come from a farm-family, my grandparents and great-grandparents and some of my cousins all on my mum's side being farmers. As a child one of the highlights of my Manitoba visits was always a trip out to the various family farms, to ride horses, play on the prairies and pick berries or other goodies from the kitchen garden patches. It's a lifestyle they all take for granted, but such a treat for us "city-dwellers"!

I look forward to the fall harvest every year and plan to make a trip to the farm the coming weeks (with related recipes posts to follow, no doubt) and urge you to look into it as well. PickYourOwn.org is a fantastic online resource for locating a pick-your-own farm of any sort in your area (and it also has lots of other resources including recipes and canning tips and much more). Happy picking!

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