Strawberry Season

I became a reluctant gardener this month. 

An enthusiastic friend surprised me with a terracotta planter from a farmer’s market. She had believed me when I said, as I had many, many times over the last three years of our acquaintance, that I would love to have an herb garden, perhaps not realizing that I would love to have an herb garden the same way I would love to have an operatic singing voice. There is, it turns out, a slight gap between my ambition and my talent.

Sheltering from summer storms affords Petey time to inspect the goods.

Nonetheless, despite my heretofore sordid history of plant murder, I’ve managed to keep everybody mostly green and alive over the past few weeks. And I have already been rewarded with my first homegrown strawberry!

Strawberries define the month of June for me. We lived surrounded by farmland in rural Oregon when I was small, and it always seemed that the minute school was out for summer, we would go straight into the fields to pick. There were child labor laws that prohibited pickers under 12 years of age, or so I was told, so Mom instructed us to duck down out of sight in the greenery whenever cars would drive by. What we did couldn’t really be called labor, surely, as we consumed roughly half of our harvest before we ever made it to the weighing station, fingers and cheeks red and sticky with tell-tale juice. 

Then home, to wash, top, slice and sugar the bounty. We made jam and tarts and strawberry rhubarb crumble, ate them over vanilla ice cream or just as they were, in stolen handfuls. 

I’ve wanted to go strawberry picking again for years, but somehow as an adult I’ve never found the time. It’s long, hot, dusty work for something you can now buy at the grocery for five bucks, regardless of the season. But I’ve got to admit, a strawberry seems to taste a little sweeter right off the vine.