lazy strawberry picking
the day's take
Strawberry season is upon us, and it's just about too much work. I couldn't even bring myself to take a new picture; the one that heads this post is really from last year. But this year it's pretty much the same scenario. I actually thought we weren't going to get strawberries this year: the plants were hit hard by the winter, and my neglectful weeding has let raspberry canes take over nearly half of the strawberry patch. But come June they started ripening almost as good as usual.
My next thought was that maybe the kids would pick them all for direct eating, and that worked for the first couple days. But this evening Harvey came in with a beautiful strawberry for Mama (very sweet, and gets him maybe 10% back into her good graces) and told us it was the only one out there. Upon investigation, that was proved to be completely false.
There's no netting up over the berries this year, so if birds and animals wanted they could make off with the whole crop. But the critters—many of them, at least—only eat like a third of each berry they decide to go for, and then leave the remains lying around all over the place, so it's more infuriating than anything else. The chickens might have done better, but I decided that I object in principal to having them graze on anything I planted (after they ate all the kale and collards this spring) so I fenced them out.
So we have to eat strawberries. In truth, there's not so many as to be onerous: a few to snack on, some more on cereal, a spinach salad with strawberries and walnuts—they do disappear. And they're pretty tasty this year, though mostly small. I guess maybe it's worth the work picking them after all.