One of my favourite days out so far this summer has been fruit picking at Brocksbushes Farm Shop & Tearoom!
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year you can only pick your own fruit if you have a ticket for a selected time slot. Tickets costs £2 per person (under 3s are free), and are booked online here. Proof of this needs to be shown on the day to allow you into the fields to pick the fruit.
Brocksbushes, near Corbridge, only release a few days for sale at a time, as they closely monitor the fruit to ensure there is enough ripe to be picked, so sometimes you can only see dates for the next available 3-4 days on their website. They have a newsletter which you can sign up to, so that you’re notified when slots become available for fruit picking!
Although strawberry picking seems to be the most popular type of fruit picking at Brocksbushes, they also have raspberries, gooseberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants!
On the day of my visit, I chose to pick strawberries and raspberries!
The entrance to the fruit picking fields is to the left of the tearoom and farm shop, with signs pointing the way! We had to use a hand sanitise station before going up to the kiosk to confirm our booking.
After that, you can enter the fields and choose to pick whatever fruit you like! Each type of fruit needs to be put in its own basket, so we had two baskets – one for raspberries and one for strawberries!
The raspberry fields are first, so we had a lot of fun picking fat, red juicy raspberries before heading on over to the strawberry fields. I had expected there to not be a lot of strawberries as I thought we might have visited quite late in the year but the season actually runs until the end of October and there were so many perfectly ripe strawberries that we got a bit carried away filling our basket as we couldn’t bare to leave such juicy strawberries!
Once you’ve picked as much fruit as you like, you queue to have it weighed and then pay for the weight. I think they say that a full basket would be approx £10 in total. I liked that you could pay contactless with card. There was also another hand sanitise station before leaving the fields.
We had such a lovely time visiting that we’d love to go again before the season is out!
And we had so much fruit that I decided to make these delicious raspberry and white chocolate muffins with a portion of the raspberries we had picked! Delicious!
