Juana and Charlotte are shocked by the size of their harvests
The rain of the last few days has made harvesting difficult. Dreary skies spitting out inconsistent precipitation makes one want to stay inside. But it has been three days since we have been out to pick strawberries so with a break in the rain and a slight brightening of the skies, Charlotte, Juana and I went out to the strawberry patch. Charlotte has become a wonderful helper in the garden as she no longer shovels food into her mouth as would a hungry rodent but carefully places her pickings in baskets to share. Though she still samples liberally.
“Holy moly, Pompi!” she shouted as she opened the gate to one of our patches. “This is unbelievable!” In our tiny 3-by-8-foot patch were countless fat, red berries. Charlotte almost could not contain herself at the bounty. As we pulled the bird netting off carefully each of us took a different station around the berry patch and started to pull fruit. Charlotte searched for the largest and most perfect of berries. With each successive brush of strawberry leaves did another albeit larger fruit reveal itself. But each brush also revealed another consequence of lots of rain and not picking for three days: slugs and rot.
While we didn’t see too many slugs (though Juana and Charlotte did brush against one each) their damage was easy to spot. Charlotte held up a strawberry she found that had been hollowed out and was merely a red shell with no innards. Juana looked disgustingly at half-eaten fruits though ate the parts untouched by our slimy residents. And there were more than a few fruits that had turned soft and mushy as they had been left in the patch for too many days.
But such setbacks were minor and we filled up our small baskets quickly, depositing them into a larger tote. We didn’t speak much as we were concentrating on the delicate, repetitive motion of finding a berry, cradling it into your hand and then snapping off the stem with your fingernail. Charlotte took a while to master this technique as she mostly tried to pull the berry off the plant, which can disturb the roots. But we all worked quietly and peacefully liberating ripe fruit from the garden.
We didn’t have as much luck in the lower strawberry patch as there were fewer ripe berries and more rotted, slug damaged ones. It mattered not as we had nearly 5 quarts of strawberries; we were ready to have more than a few berries as a reward. We then collected a head of lettuce and a small basket of snow peas for dinner.
As we looked at our harvest in the kitchen we could tell that Summer’s bounty had arrived and that the smell of bubbling jam on the stove would soon arrive.
