Mandarin picking

I've had a bee in my bonnet for a while about going to pick mandarins from a local farm that sets aside a grove for public picking. Last Sunday the weather was a little bit iffy-looking, but we decided to go for it! We grabbed a car and set off on the hour-long drive north to the farm.

The drive itself was really nice. We were out in farm country, where every half mile there were signs for local produce for sale. There were also these little roadside sheds, where you could stop and leave money in a box for whatever you took.

The farm was down in a valley called Wisemans Ferry. Before we headed down into the valley, we stopped at an overlook of the river.

I was starting to get a little concerned about our gas gauge at this point - we'd left Sydney with half a tank and I had cheerfully assumed that on what looked like a major road on the map, there would be plenty of petrol stations. That had not turned out to be true. We decided to go past our turnoff for the farm and go into the town of Wisemans Ferry and hope there was a station. Luckily, there was! It didn't look like much, with just three pumps with the old-fashioned click-over numbers. But it got the job done!

Then we headed down into the valley and onto a one lane, packed-dirt road.

Luckily we only passed two cars on this part of the road! And this creepy old food trailer.

We made it to the farm without incident. And there were actually a surprising number of other people that had made the trip. We quickly paid our $10 for our mandarin-collecting bucket and headed deep into the orchard.

The sounds of shouting kids were pretty muffled back in there,  and we were basically by ourselves. Toby scouted out some good trees for us.

Even though our bucket was pretty big, filling it up with fruit took no time at all!

We had learned when we got our mandarin bucket that we could also pick mushrooms from their mushroom shed. We decided we should do that too!

The mushroom picking was just as fun as the mandarins. We used scissors to snip them off at the base and then brush off the dirt from them. We ended up with a good-size paper bag full of them. Too fun!

We were pretty happy with the $20 spent on mushrooms and mandarins. Especially when we got home and put our mandarin bag on the counter - they had somehow expanded in the car and we had way more than we could ever eat! But between juicing them and giving some away, it worked out OK!

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