Strawberries.
Tasty, sweet, tangy. Fear them.
Last year we felt a compulsion to plant strawberries. We didn’t know why we should bother. Rabbits eat all of our plants anyway. But mysterious forces have their own way of handling things. Once let outside our sweet house cat turned out to be a rabid devourer of small furry creatures and defender of vegetables. The hopping menace at bay, we figured, what the heck we’d give it a try. Neighbors split off some plants for us and into the ground they went. We read all about care and feeding of strawberries and then proceeded to ignore them and follow none of the advice.
The little plants grew. The leaves on the plants grew big enough to deny sun to most of the weeds trying to compete with them. Rains came and went. The plants begat flowers. The flowers begat tiny green strawberries. Tiny green strawberries begat the intense interest of our 2 year old daughter. We began losing barely pink strawberries at a tremendous rate to our daughter’s gleeful incursions. The cat, frustrated at not being large enough to stop her from plucking the not quit yet luscious fruit, turned to catnip to drown his shame.
And the season ended. We were not sure how many strawberries we could have gotten had Youngest Daughter of the Cast Iron Stomach not developed a taste for woody, tart white berries. The neighbor’s plants that we propagated from all died. We debated digging them up and planting peanuts. I got slapped for making jokes about how much I’d love to stick my peanuts into the warm moist soil.
But winter ended, spring came, and the easiest thing to do was to let the strawberries grow. And grow they did. Scary growth. By June this year, 5 scrawny little plants had taken over an entire 5’x15’ garden terrace. The cat no longer prowled them because the leaves were too thick for bunnies to push through. And then came the flowers. It was like a snowstorm of white in our garden. And the fruit grew and ripened. A quart of strawberries every three days. Week after week we enjoyed the fruit.
Well, not we. As it was their favorite fruit we let our two youngest daughters have the majority of the bounty. Youngest Daughter of the Cast Iron Stomach did let them grow ripe before picking them this year, and daughters did help pick, but their arms were not long enough to reach the center of the patch, and the mutant nature of their growth had covered any walk paths into the heart of the bed. The adults had become slaves to the strawberries and the Unfillable Robots of Berry Consumption that looked like our daughters. At night we could almost hear the strawberries taunting us “We’re still growing! See you tomorrow in the blazing sun! ON YOUR KNEES TO PICK US!”
“But you are June bearing strawberries! You must stop fruiting soon!” we call out in desperation. Haunting berry laughter is all we hear in return, and the berries kept coming.
Months went by. Eventually the weather cooled off and picking became easier. Even the Robots reached their filling point and began sharing berries with me. But the berries keep coming. It is mid September and the weather is unseasonably warm in the Midwest. I am sure it is the berries’ doing. They want to continue growing. I can see their plans to overrun the edging of the garden and sprawl into the yard. I fear that there they will hook up with the wild strawberries and form an unstoppable army.
So yes, our strawberriesdid well this year! Thanks for asking!
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