Strawberries! Strawberries EVERYWHERE!
They started out so small and innocent, my strawberry plants.
They were just tiny things, little stalks (not even fully-formed plants) that I stuck in the ground in one tiny little corner of my largest garden patch. I’ve got three patches, you see; one large one (that gets the most sun) and two smaller ones that flank our patio door. I stuck some asparagus over there, too, and largely ignored it—it takes three years for the stuff to grow to edibility, but I was happy to wait.
I wasn’t too sure about the strawberries. I’d never tried to grow them before, but adore them immensely. The asparagus is lovely, too; I have fond memories of eating freshly-picked asparagus out of my grandparents’ garden when I was very small. Peas were my favorite, but asparagus was up there too. Yes, I was totally an odd child. 
Ah, but back to the strawberries! I can’t remember when I planted them, exactly, but it’s been a few years. And progressively, they’ve taken over the whole of my large garden patch. I used to grow tomatoes and salad greens there as well, but now there’s no room. And every year, several times a year, I ask myself why it is that I don’t rip back most of that patch, because it’s kind of annoying not being able to grow anything else there anymore. I mean, I can’t complain about the state of my strawberry plants, nor about the state of the patch itself—it’s very healthy soil, and absolutely lousy with happy little earthworms. It should be, too—we’ve fed the entire garden area a ton of bokashi over the past few years. But the thing about strawberry plants that I’ve learned is, they’re kind of hard to control. What started as two or three little plants has taken over a 5 x 5 garden patch, and is crawling underground and pushing its way into our lawn.
But then June rolls around every year, and I remember why it was that I planted these things in the first place. See, I used to go on strawberry-picking and jamming missions every year in early June, just over the border in Wisconsin. Which was fun (and delicious), despite the guarantee of a sunburn and copious amounts of mosquito bites.
As always, though…they taste better if you grow them yourself. Period. Taking all possible stances on pollutants and chemicals and social justice out of the equation, and leaving only taste on the table for consideration, this fact cannot be denied. The ones in Wisconsin that we picked ourselves were nice, to be sure—and far nicer than some of the ones carted in from who knows where (usually California, though) in the shops. But these? Even when they were tiny, they still had them beat flavor-wise. There’s a wild, unrestrained taste you can’t get out of a store-bought berry. And which has apparently been bred out of the farmed berries we were picking. Alas.
There are, of course, wonderful heirloom varieties of strawberries that you can find at your local farmer’s markets and co-ops, if you’re lucky. And those are wonderful, too. Those, in fact, are probably the only ones I’d say can rival the ones you grow yourself, if you put forth the effort. But if you do, you’ll be rewarded perennially, which is fantastic. My strawberry plants are so robust now that they seem to no longer care if I actually cover them with straw come the first frost—I purposely declined to do so last year, in fact, in a passive-aggressive move toward thwarting their continued incursion across our yard. No such luck; they’re more robust this year than ever.
Interestingly, over the past few years, the only pests we’ve had trouble with, strawberry-wise, have been slugs. Diatomaceous earth in the form of natural clay kitty litter did the trick, and this year I haven’t seen evidence of a single one…yet. Now that I’ve said that, of course, I’ll find holes in all the rest of the berries that should be ripening over the next week.
Janaki
