[slow, upbeat music] Strawberry fields as far as the eye can see.

Today we travel to McAdams Farm in Efland, North Carolina, where fourth and fifth generations of this family are working the land.

And on this rather windy day, we get a tour with strawberry picking tips from my friends Karen and Howard McAdams.

Well hello there, how are you?

It's so good to see you.

- Good to see you, too, Sheri, welcome to McAdams Farm.

- Thank you, my stars, you have got strawberry fields forever here.

How long have yall been doing this?

- We've been doing strawberries about 22 or three years, and we have about two acres of strawberries for people to do you-pick, and people love to come out to farms.

- So what makes a strawberry happy?

If they had the perfect growing conditions, and it sure looks like they do, what would those be?

- We have found that to grow a good crop of strawberries, you need to have good soil fertility.

You also need to plant the strawberries at the right time.

- [Sheri] So can we pick some berries?

- [Karen] We can pick some berries.

- Look here, you've already seeded my bucket.

- I've started a little bit.

- More productive than I actually am.

But, now, what variety of strawberries are these?

Because, you know, some people think that there's, a berry's a berry, but this is a particular kind, right?

- So the variety that we grow predominantly is called chandler, which is an older variety.

They're very sweet, they're juicy, they're a little bit smaller than some of the berries you'll see in the grocery store, but they have excellent quality, do good for jams, jellies, freeze them, fresh fruit.

- [Sheri] So show me how to pick one.

- If you pick a berry with a green tip, you're gonna have a green tip when you eat that berry.

So this is about what you like to pick.

- Well, I want you to show me how to pick one.

Take a look, make sure you got the cap come with it?

- [Karen] Make sure the cap is on.

- Okay, 'cause it always seemed to me that when the cap was gone, it's kind of like pulling the plug and that they were going to get watery and all of that stuff.

- Definitely does.

Well, that's the other thing that we see is people come out here and they say I'm gonna wash it and put it on the kitchen table.

Well, they need to go in the refrigerator and you don't wash them until you get ready to use them.

- So you do keep yours in the refrigerator.

- I do, but I think they taste better if you let them get to room temperature before you eat them.

- That's true of so many things, isn't it?

[fun, upbeat music] So you wanna hear a fun little strawberry factoid, they're technically not a berry.

They are not a berry because all the seeds are on the outside instead of the inside, each one of these little golden yellow dots is a little seed casing with a microscopic seed inside.

We can call them what they want, but they're still about my favorite berry.

[fun, upbeat music] - So you remember Howard, my husband, and my oldest daughter Callie McAdams.

- Callie, it's great to see you.

- Yeah.

- Howard, I got a question.

Did you just get up and put that on this morning, or?

You've gotta tell me about your outfit here.

- They're paving the road, so traffic's stopped, so I went down there and walked beside them.

They had to look.

- Yeah, sometimes you just have to have a little fun when you're working hard all the time.

- So what's the most fun thing about strawberries?

Or is anything fun about strawberries?

Other than the outfit.

- Yeah, there are many fun things.

June 10th is a really fun day, because then we're over.

It's over.

[Howard and Sheri laugh] And they taste so much better than tobacco.

- That's true.