A
t my house, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are carefully circled on the calendar but not for the reasons you might expect.
Cards are nice – berries are better. Mother’s Day marks the height of strawberry season: strawberry pie, strawberries scattered over a simple spinach salad, strawberries draped atop fluffy angel food cake, strawberry daiquiris, smoothies, even strawberry salsa. Father’s Day marks the start of another berry craze: blueberry muffins, blueberry cobbler and blueberry waffles. The McNeill family has been growing strawberries in Gray’s Creek for the past 20 years. “We have people who use the strawberry patch as a rendezvous point,” says Clifton McNeill Jr. “They see each other once a year at the patch.”
The McNeills just never imagined
that the city would come so close to the family farm. With a portion of the farm dating back to an original land grant from England, McNeills have been living off the land for generations. Now, they are surrounded by new homes and a state-of- the-art school. But that’s one of the beauties of Fayetteville; you don’t have to venture far from the city limits to find fresh produce this summer. “There’s nothing that beats local
grown,” McNeill says. “We take it off the plant and within two hours, you’ve got it home. It doesn’t get much fresher than that.” But McNeill has a word to the wise
for all you Yankees. By Memorial Day, strawberry season in southeastern North Carolina is all but over. Soon, the McNeills will begin planting new rows of neat, plastic-lined beds of new
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“We take it off the plant and within two hours, you’ve got it home. It doesn’t get much fresher
than that.” - Clifton McNeill Jr.
