Last week the strawberries came in: both domestic and wild. The domestic ones are familiar and tasty. Emerging from their straw bed last month, their pollinated flowers metaphorized into small whitish balls changing again into large, sweet red orbs. Charlotte, my granddaughter, can’t wait to visit us this time of year to survey and select the ripest of them. She has been in the garden nearly all of her life picking berries though now at the mature age of 8 has much more self-restraint than she had at the age of 2 or 3 when each strawberry she selected was deposited in her mouth rather than her basket.
We return to the strawberry patch lifting the bird netting carefully, which helps deter the birds and chipmunks that like to dine on the fruit. Now she stretches across the garden with a long lanky body formed through running up and down our lawn. She concentrates intensely as she considers which fruit to select and put into her basket. We always sample our early picks and enjoy a trickle of juice down our faces. This has been a good year so far with each day delivering us between a pint and quart of strawberries. The first strawberries we harvested were used on a shortcake my wife, Juana, made. It was delicious. We are now becoming jaded as a plethora of fruits are picked fresh each morning.
The wild ones in our yard, are not wild per se but Indian strawberries (Potentilla indica). The tiny, fairly flavorless berries are not smooth but have many tiny red seeds emerging much like the head of a doll that has lost much of its hair. We have two large patches of it that are increasing their coverage over my lawn as they are known for their fortitude as a ground cover being an invasive species from India. I will let them fight it out with the Japanese stiltgrass, which has taken over other parts of my yard. These berries are attractive to look at and they have been sampled by a few local rabbits, but few others. Not even the slugs.
