Strawberry Fields Forever

If you'd ask me ten, no, five, even two, years ago to compile a list of "100 Things I Will Never Be Interested In Doing," then I am pretty sure "Gardening" and "Picking Berries" would have been on that list. The local Safeway has a lovely selection of fruits and berries, so why on Earth would one bother to go to the trouble of growing one's own? Worse, why would one spend one's precious free time out in the woods looking for berries?

Now, I'm learning to enjoy both. This has everything to do with kids, of course. I still think I'd prefer buying to growing if it were just me to think about. Seven? He's a good man, but if it were just the two of us, and he wanted fresh berries, he'd be out there picking them himself.

We have wild raspberries that grow out on the back of our land here. Last year, the four of us would tramp through the mile-high weeds to find the raspberry trees and pick the berries. The kids didn't necessarily enjoy the picking of the berries, but they definitely loved the eating of the berries.

As for me, it felt good to see the kids eat something straight from the earth. There were no pesticides. There was nothing artificial put into the ground to produce larger berries. There were just the berries Mother Nature saw fit to plant there. Fresh. Pure. I felt so close to nature. I also felt the kids got a better appreciation of the miracles that the land can produce. Never mind that I'll most certainly come across an article about all the fresh, pure bacteria that thrive on wild berries. . .

I decided we should try to grow strawberries. The kids LOVE strawberries. We live in the country with wide open spaces, so this year we planted our first plants.

The blurry thing in front is a blossoming strawberry plant.

The same plant with strawberries.

The taste test.

It was a bit of work to plant the patch and tend to it. It's taken some time, research on my part, since I didn't know a damn thing about growing plants. I even dealt in a little cow poo fertilizer. (Yuck! This is just to get them started. After this, the plants are on their own. They'll have to suck the nutrients out of that ground!) It hasn't felt like work at all, though. It's just been. . .fun. Fun to watch the plants grow. Fun to see the first strawberries blossom. Fun to watch how protective Laney is of 'her' little patch. The birds ate the first of the strawberries, so she and Nicky were insistent that I cover the plants to keep the birds off of them. Laney loves to go down and check on the strawberries. "The birds CANNOT eat my strawberries!" Next year, I plan to plant her and Nicky each their own little strawberry patch to tend.

The kids also love blueberries. Blueberries abound in the hills around here. It is very common for Norwegian grandmothers to take to the hills in the late summer to pick blueberries. It's less common among the younger generations, but a lot of people still do it. You can come back with pounds of blueberries, if you're good. I prefer to eat the berries freshly picked. However, you can get so much from one trip, you can also make your own jam or jelly. Tomorrow, we're making blueberry muffins. Yum.

Picking berries.

Raspberries are late this year, but we'll be out gathering what we can when they're ripe. The longer I live in the country, the more "country-fied" I become, and I love it.

I draw the line at caring for farm animals, though. If I start blogging about milking my own cows, then there's no turning back.


I've become someone else.