Evicted Strawberry Plants

When I was young, I remember my Aunt Mary having some berry plants and I thought how wonderful it would be to have my own one day when I grew up.  So last season I planted 6 strawberry plants. Doesn't sound like many but I don't have a large garden and relatively speaking, these plants were given the most space of any plant in the garden so far.  But remember, this was a childhood dream, so they were treated like kings!

They say that you can grow them in Florida as a perennial, just plant once and they'll keep on producing.  The truth?  Who knows!  These guys went wild last season, growing all sorts of greens, sending runners out and forming new plants anywhere and everywhere....then they just stopped.  Went dormant maybe?   They got thin looking, lost lots of leaves and stopped flowering.  But with space at a premium, nothing is allowed to be in stand-by mode, so they were evicted and relocated into a few pots.  Looking nice and green, will they flower and fruit?  Let's wait and see....

More Berries

The strawberries are really starting to come in now.  There are by no means enough of them to actually make anything, but they're super nice to nibble on. I often wonder how many plants we would need to produce enough for some jam.  I sure do love some homemade jam (hint hint Sis#1).  You can see behind the flower up there that we have lots coming in, but they'll all ripen at vastly different times. No matter, I'll just keep nibbling away.

First Strawberry

We planted the strawberry plants about 2 weeks behind the other plants in the garden because we couldn't  find any at the time.  The agricultural center for our area says they're a fall crop but the stores and nurseries must not be on the same schedule. So they were a bit of  a late bloomer, we had lots and lots of green foliage with dark green leaves and healthy runners going in all directions. So we just enjoyed watching the runners root and figured we would get berries next year. And then......a bunch of flowers started popping up which meant taking 199,678 pictures because I love how cute and cheery the white blooms are.

We never really got into the habit of  checking the strawberries too often because it seemed like nothing was happening, then the big frost fiasco came and we were preoccupied with keeping the tomato plants alive.  So we were totally surprised by the white berry that was peeking out when we were uncovering the plants. The missed the pink stages and the berry quickly turned reddish. Oh well.  We were all about the final product anyway. And it was a goodie!

So pretty! It had much more flavor compared with the store bought berries.  The texture was different too, alot softer whereas the store ones have an unripe crunchiness that I always dislike.  It's not all that perfectly shaped but I'm still pretty proud of it!