Berry picking at Underwood Family Farm

Last weekend, N and I headed up to the Simi Valley area to pick fruit at Underwood Family Farms. We've gone cherry picking in SoCal before, but I had this grand plan in mind wherein I would come home with pounds-upon-pounds of fruit that was easily freezable. Then I'd make awesome, fresh-tasting fruit smoothies in the middle of winter. So with that in mind, I decided that blueberries would be the perfect choice.

Underwood Family Farms has two locations, but we went to the one in Somis since that's where the berries were (their Moorpark location is mostly vegetables). It also seems to be a much smaller farm, and we wanted something that was quiet. It was the tail end of blueberry season, but there was still plenty to pick. The farm was almost completely empty, which we really appreciated. I called beforehand and found out we were allowed to bring Stewie with us, so with us he came!

There was a fun little tractor ride to the blueberry field:

N hoarding blueberries in his container:

Even though it was technically only 75 degrees that day, we were out in the glaring sun and it was HOT. Hot-hot-hot! Stewie was being so wussy that he started to drive me crazy. He kept crawling along the bush line desperately trying to find as much shade as he could (which there really wasn't much of since it was around noon). I was trying to be an efficient blueberry picking machine, but all his leash pulling and frantic yanking made it impossible. I had also recently given him a bath, so while he started out nice and white, by the time we left he was a distinct yellow color from all that army crawling he did through the shade.

It was so sunny he could barely keep his eyes open:

N did the majority of the picking while I dealt with Stewie. So instead of pounds-upon-pounds of blueberries, we only ended up with 2.5 lbs. And we ate all of them in the following week. And they were the sweetest blueberries I've ever had (by the way, fresh blueberries + cottage cheese = awesomeness). We could have picked so much more. Darn you, Stewie!

There were also raspberries available for picking, but they were few and far between. We ended up with less than half a pound of them. This is where Stewie is thinking, "Can we go back to the air conditioned car now please? PLEASE???":

The farm also had several animals in pens to feed/look at. Here's Stewie encountering his first goat. Why, hello there....

And his first chicken (which had a really badass hairdo):

The farm had a little stand that sold veggies from their Moorpark location, so I also swooped in and bought fresh corn, golden beets, bok choy and romaine. Their produce looked FANTASTIC. The romaine literally looked like a heart of romaine but it was the whole head somehow (somehow!!). We've eaten everything  and I can also say it was all very tasty.

And finally, we had to take a photo of Stewie's blueberry-stained feet. What an adorable paw bouquet: