Strawberry week
Sometimes,
I like to ponder how I would make different decisions if I was truly
forced to be self-sufficient. My scenarios range from the
fantastical --- we fall back through a time portal and are hacking our
living out of the wilderness --- to the prosaic --- we simply can't
afford storebought goodies.
Strawberry week is one
indulgence that would definitely go if I had to
be truly self-sufficient. Since strawberries are my favorite
fruit, I spend the first week of full harvest gorging to my heart's
content. We have strawberries breakfast, lunch, and dinner (and
for dessert, of course), and I don't worry one bit about preserving a
berry for later.
If I was counting on our
own stores of fruit to get us through the winter, though, strawberry
week would go. Especially in a year like this one where an early
bloom combined with a late frost wiped out the first berries,
shortening our usual month of strawberries to more like two or three
weeks. Even with unlimited fruit at the grocery store, I wouldn't
treat myself to so many berries now if I didn't have the option of
storebought winesap apples from the fruit stand to get
me through the winter.
As it is, we've only filled
the food
dehydrator with the
fixings for strawberry
leather once so far,
and I suspect we may fit in one more batch before the berries start to
dwindle. Homegrown strawberry leather really perks us up in
February and March when there's nearly nothing fresh coming in from the
garden. But not so much that I want to eliminate strawberry
week....
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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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