Strawberries 2021

July 03, 2021

Strawberries 2021

I told Donnie earlier in the season that in a few years we will be able to open a u-pick strawberry farm in our backyard. After he mowed the yard one day, he came inside and told me agreed!! 🍓 😊 All right, zoning regulations would likely render such an endeavor impossible. If we don’t reign in the spreading of the strawberry plants, though, the strawberry patch will continue to spread (and that is OK with me). The plants are not letting the existence of say, grass, impede their spread. The only thing that has stopped their spread is the wood skirting of our deck as they’ve reached that barrier on one side of the garden. What’s interesting is that the strawberry plants that abut the deck are greener and fuller than the ones that don’t abut the deck. I get the impression that they are doing everything in their power to not let the wood barrier prevent their spread. Alas, I think they’ve met their match.

The propagating of the plants has resulted in an abundance of strawberries in the patch this year. (I read an article a couple of years ago that said as the plants spread to expect less strawberries as the plant’s energy is being used mostly for propagating and not strawberry producing.) I’m glad the experts are wrong, so far, at least in that as plants in our garden propagate they continue to produce berries. Between the end of May and the end of June, we picked upwards of 1000 strawberries. Yes, 1000 and I know that because I counted almost every single one of them!! I picked strawberries at least once a day for about three weeks and I wrote down how many I picked- I would count each one as I washed the strawberries to place them in a container to put in the refrigerator each evening. There were a couple of times when I didn’t write down how many I picked but based on the times when I wrote down how many, and adding those numbers up, it comes to around 1000 so I know I picked at least 1000 berries.

The week that Alyssa was in South Carolina with her best friend coincided with the most prolific strawberry producing week here at Rineer Quarter Acre. In Alyssa’s absence, we could not keep up with eating all of the strawberries that I was picking each day (and honestly had she been here to eat berries, we still would have had an excess of berries each day). I began to freeze the berries that we didn’t eat and now have a sizable amount of berries in the freezer. I will plan to use those soon as I’m not sure how long they’ll stay good in the freezer.

I picked berries the morning that Abby and I left for Nashville- June 17th- thinking it would likely be the last of the berries of the season that I would pick (I could not cajole Jacob, Alyssa or Donnie into picking berries while I was gone 😣). When I came home, however, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were still berries to be picked. I picked the last of the berries on June 22nd (at least that’s the last day that I took a picture of/ counted my berry picking so I believe it’s the last day). So with the first berry being picked on May 24 and the last on June 22, that is almost a full month of beautiful berries. Love my overflowing strawberry patch- picking, eating, counting, and photographing berries became a fun part of June.

Garden pictures are probably among the most banal for everyone except the gardener. But since I am the gardener and I want these pictures displayed in one place, here they are.

May days- fun to see the white strawberries slowly turn red…

In late May, May 24th to be exact, one ripe strawberry emerged in the patch.

Meanwhile, lots of these were waiting to ripen.

On May 28, I picked the first substantial amount of berries (51) and celebrated with a photo shoot. The vast majority of the photos will remain on my camera roll.

Back to the patch… here you can see (if you care to look closely...) lots of little red strawberries. You can also see that the plants that are touching the deck skirting look fuller and greener than their non touching the skirting plant counterparts.

This was the year that the plants mosied their way to the front of the deck. They turned a corner, literally.

We have some daylily plants in front of the deck. The strawberry plants just didn’t mind if they did- they encroached on the daylilies. These strawberries in the middle of the daylily plant crack me up.

Here is where I could post picture after picture after picture of daily strawberries hauls but for brevity’s sake, I will just post a few (in addition to writing down how many I picked each day, I photographed each day’s pickings).