Strawberry Fields Forever… or a Little Strawberry Patch…

Last year was the first time I experienced the excitement of my own vegetable garden. It was a lot of work, and the food goes so fast… but it’s still worth it. The experience was mostly a success, with some failures… or surprises. For instance, I planted heirloom tomato plants, thinking they were watermelon plants. I figured the squash, zucchini, and cantaloupe tags were exaggerating about the amount of space needed for each plant; WHO has THAT much space anyways?? So, that area of my garden looked like a vegetable jungle, but I still got some great zucchini, interesting round squash, and cantaloupe.

I’m running a little behind this year. I’ve only planted pea plants, and transplanted some random strawberry plants. My grandma Linda, a Master Gardener (capitalized because she completed a Master Gardener program at Washington State University. She knows all things gardening) gave me some potted strawberry plants as well. So I officially have a strawberry patch this year.

Tonight Lexi and I picked our first strawberry harvest of the year. I didn’t expect to have any of those fleshy red balls of goodness so early!

My excitement rose with each additional berry that went into the bowl. To my dismay, we found many berries gnawed on, gutted, or just a messy ball of grossness… something, besides the hubster, has been eating our strawberries!

I washed and cut the strawberries. I hate waste, so I was just going to cut off any part of a strawberry that had a sign of being gnawed on by a garden creature. The first one I cut into, a very alive potato-bug-cousin came quickly crawling out. I caught it in a jar, with the intention of finding out just who this intruder is. I’m not so interested in learning its origin as I am learning the secret of its demise. I want him and his family out of my strawberry patch!

The bug incident kind of creeped me out, so I threw out any strawberry that was questionable, cut up the rest, and we all had a very nice snack of homegrown, fresh-from-the-garden berries. My Master Gardener Grandma would be proud 🙂

Until we meet again…