Picking my own (with a little help from two daughters). Blackberries, Rasberries and Huckleberries. Huckleberry makes a good jelly, The Ras and black are going combined into pies.
So they take their kids to work with them? That's my suspicion.
The local creepy guy stated:
“I used to ride my bike to the berry farm on summer mornings to do exactly that.”
Parents are united in keeping this fellow out of the berry fields.
Where are these poor kid’s parents? Oh, that’s right! The parents are the ones making them pick the berries. The only villans in the article are the companies...
The liberals want these kids in school so they can learn the proper way to put on a condom.
WOW. Kids working in the fields in the summer, instead of TV and video games. The horror!
Good lord. Maybe is was just California but everyone I knew picked berries in the summer for a few extra dollars.
Nothing to get hung about.
Oh heck! Picking berries and cherries were great summer kid jobs when I was growing up. It was especially funny the first day because you could eat all you wanted, and you could always depend on some kid eating until he puked.
It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was something to do and it kept you busy during the boring part of summer. Plus all the movies, soda and comic books...
I miss those days.
I use to take my grandkids to the strawberry farm to pick. They loved it and I was ready to leave before they were..got to eat all the strawberrys they wanted....It took a lot of quarts to make 4 batches of jam plus strawberry shortcake...
Growing up in Tacoma WA in the 1960s picking Strawberries was a great way for us kids to earn summer money. You had to be 12 with signed permission from you parents is all. The “Strawberry bus” would pick kids up at a stop two blocks away from my home and take us to the Puyallup Valley, where we would get paid by the flat, so the amount you made depended on how hard you worked. It was great fun, and I always had enough after each day of picking to buy a new plastic model, a bag of candy, and have some left over to save for our family vacation to Disneyland.
Leave it to the Government to call it an abuse of child labor.
why can't kids work?...especially picking blueberries.....its not like we're asking them to work with heavy machinery....
Obamaville
Even children are slaves to the system.
Don’t tell anybody, but I paid my cousin’s six-year-old $10 to pick my green beans. She was so excited and couldn’t wait to go to the bank and put it in her account!
As I recall from my, in retrospect, childhood in Elysium; picking strawberries was like therapy after WEEDING half an acre of them.
If school is out, why not? Or is this a nannyism?
One again, ABC goes for the low hanging fruit.
I wish, as a child, I was picking strawberries instead of my many other chores.
And no, there was NO allowance given in my household. Chores, no matter how hard, were apart of life.
I had to start doing my own laundry when I was 10.....WITH NO PAY. They would probably have my Aunt arrested in today’s culture.
I just purchased some Michigan blueberries. Terrific! better than NJ’s this year.
No one ever says anything about the child labor in the Girl Scouts who are encouraged to sit at card tables outside supermarkets during February and March every year hawking their terrible cookies. The money raised selling these cookies goes to the council and then a few bucks are sent back to the troop. My daughter and all of the girls in her troop sold GS cookies for years and their troop never got much back. Because I believed my daughter was basically raising money for the muckety-mucks, I called the headquarters and asked for the salaries of the people in charge and they refused to tell me.
When I lived in Anderson County (TX) there were several You-pick fruit farms. In the summer (when the fruit was ripe and the days were hot) I would take my sons to these farms and we would pick fruit — blueberries, peaches, plums, and blackberries.
We would pick all day. My kids would be exhausted by the end of the day. On the drive home, I would ask them if they had fun. I would always get pretty much the same answer — “It was okay for a day, but I’d had to do it for a living.” And I’d always say, “that’s why you want to work hard at school. So you can do better than find a job picking fruit.”
It must have stuck. Two are now engineers (and EITs) and the third is a sophomore in Mechanical Engineering.
(Didn’t hurt that when my wife canned the fruit we picked, she made them help. Same comment — fun for a few days, but you’d hate to do that for a living. But I miss those days now that I am in the Houston area.)
WoW! I picked blueberry’s in Michigan as an 11 year old.............. it never hurt me. In fact, I enjoyed spending the money I earned.