Breaking the strawberry fast
Mom emailed me that she
picked the first strawberry out of her garden nearly a week ago.
Even though she lives only an hour and a half away (23 miles as the
crow flies), the pavement in her urban location and the lower elevation
means she's considerably warmer than we are.
Our strawberries are
nowhere near ready --- this photo depicts the one that's furthest
along, sporting a tiny hint of color. The rest need probably two
more weeks before they'll even begin to ripen.
Ten miles down the road in
the other direction is a huge strawberry farm that serves all of the
surrounding grocery stores. They use row cover fabric and black
plastic and their berries tend to ripen up when Mom's do, so I have a
feeling Mark could pick me up a whole flat of local fruits at the
grocery store today if I asked him nicely. (Actually, I checked
out the farm's website and they had berries starting April 14.)
But do I want to break
my strawberry fast on chemical-fertilized red nuggets, or wait for the
real deal?
Keep in mind that
strawberries are my very favorite fruit (and fruit is my very favorite
food group. Yes, even before chocolate.) I don't eat
berries out of season, so it's been a very long eleven and a half
months. Sure, I've been self-medicating with strawberry
leather pretty
heavily throughout the winter, but I just don't know if I can wait two
more weeks!
Will I, or won't I?
(If you'd like some
actual content today, check out my
interview on RDG's blog.)
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I enjoyed reading your interview. You are sooooooo down to Earth.
I got into permaculture when my son let me read his book "Gias' Garden" I immediately went out and bought my own copy and have been implimenting its practices a little each year.
This year I have made several huglekulture rows that I am planting with potatoes and a couple fruit sapplings.
I have not done any swels because we live in the middle of a forest. and ground is hard clay.
Jessie --- Interesting! I've never tried that, although I have had pretty good luck with maintaining very good strawberry flavor with freezer jam. We still like the leather, better, though.
Mona --- So glad you enjoyed the interview! (And thank you for your kind words!) I've dipped into Gaia's Garden, but I'm wanting to read the whole thing through. Maybe that'll be our next reading club selection!
MamaHomesteader --- You'd better be careful, or you'll end up with a daughter like me. When I was her age, I learned that if I went out to the strawberry patch and ate all those strawberries that just showed the first hint of red, they weren't quite as tasty as when ripe but were pretty good...and no one else got any.
Maggie --- Yep, it's a hard life.
We did get those strawberries. They were about half as good as homegrown --- worth eating at this time of year, but I'll turn up my nose in a couple of weeks.