ON THE ROAD: Hopkins strawberry farm offers family fun right outside Columbia

HOPKINS, SC (WOLO) — With almost all pandemic restrictions lifted, you may be excited to go some places this summer.

If you don’t have the money to take a big family vacation, no worries. There’s stuff to do not far from home

“Well, we just try to perfect growing strawberries and we like to think we do a good job at it.”

Just outside Columbia, in Hopkins, sits Cottle Strawberry Farm. The fruit here sits nine months in the soil with planting beginning in October and harvest season from March to June.

“During the summer months, we just move the soil around and add nutrients to it. During the rest of the year, these plants have to be picked by hand a couple times a week and cleaned by hand,” said farm manager Hunter Bulloch. “There’s about 500,000 plants originally and they multiply into about 2 to 2 point 5 million plants. It’s a lot of work.”

For you, the only work is to choose a container size and pick the strawberries. For the farmers, the hours are long and the weather plays a big part.

“You want it to be warm but you don’t want it to be too hot. The heat is good for producing more berries quicker,” Bulloch said. “The moisture will soften the berries and make them not marketable. Strawberries hate moisture. Every time it rains, you have to determine if you’re going to leave berries for the public or pick your fields clean.”

As much fun as it is to pick the berries, the farm manager says it’s even better to taste them. He says they’re much fresher than the ones at the store.

“It’s a trade-with strawberries between sweetness and shelf-life. The sweeter the berry, the less it lasts,” Bulloch said. “Ours have a high sugar content, so they’ll be good for a few days but they’re sweet as candy.”

Bulloch says that the strawberry picking season will last about 6 more weeks, so there’s plenty of time to get out to the farm in Lower Richland or its other location in Florence. 

“It’s a fun thing to do with the kids. Through the year, most of our customers are multi generational customers. You have grandparents. A lot of people have made a lot of memories with their children and grandchildren,” Bulloch concluded.