I never wrote a sequel to the great strawberry harvest of 2021:
At the time, I didn’t seem to have had much hope of a good crop. As it turned out, however, the yield was very good indeed. And my portioned bags of frozen fruit saw us through many a cold winter Saturday family card night with margaritas and daiquiris.
Ultimately though, I lost the war on weeds that year and started over with new plants, and they haven’t had enough time yet to fill in, so no followup harvest.
But as it turns out, you can cheat, and visit a tourism farm or whatever they call them. That wasn’t on the menu for me as a kid out west, but apparently affluent white people from the midwestern burbs just can’t resist the opportunity to drive out into the countryside and pay a farmer to pick their crops for them. Whoever came up with that business plan is a genius.
It sounds absurd, but if you want to buy some fruit in bulk, it’s ultimately cheaper. Bonus: it builds character too.
30 pounds of fruit yielded about 2.5 gallons of jam and butter, plus some reserved for freezing.
Also this was not my project – I just took photos. To chronicle the homesteading and such. Liz doesn’t want to write blogs, so she can’t fight back when I talk about her here and say things like that she labeled the cans wrong. Nya nya!
As for me, I’ll save my canning for tomatoes and broth. (And the tomatoes I’ll be growing myself! I’ll even let the kid pick them for me for free.)
–Simon