Five gallons of strawberries
Usually, we have
three strawberry
varieties in
the garden --- early, midseason, and late. I hated the late
variety we tried last year (Allstar), though, so I ripped it out
and didn't replace it with a new late variety (Sparkle) until this
spring. Instead, I just increased my plantings of the early
and midseason varieties.
That sounded like a
good idea at the time, but then the peak harvest came on...all at
once. Monday,
I filled the dehydrator with two gallons of fruits and we ate
perhaps another half gallon. Tuesday was the same, but it became clear
the strawberries needed to get picked even faster. So I
asked Mark to get me low-sugar pectin at the grocery store,
invited one of our young
helpers over as
a picker, and planned for Wednesday to be strawberry day.
Before I regale you with what we did with
Wednesday's five gallons of strawberries, I should give you the
bad news. This spring's cool, wet conditions were perfect
for fungal spread, and the many of the Honeoye plants came down
with strawberry leaf spot (Mycosphaerella
fragariae). This fungus
causes a decline in vigor, which means the fruits aren't as sweet
and are more prone to rotting. My solution is to cut out the
rotten bits, add more honey than usual when making fruit leather,
and mix in the virtually-untouched and still-very-sweet Ozark
Beauties. (Think of this as like making cider --- a
combination of varieties leads to a fuller-bodied taste.)
Leaf spot aside,
there were still plenty of fruits to preserve for the
winter. I
filled the dehydrator once, put aside enough to fill it again before bed, then
moved on to a double recipe of strawberry freezer
jam.
We've already
preserved more strawberries this week than all of last year, and I
figure we'll need at least one more massive strawberry day to use
up the rest.
Even the chickens
were happy. With all of the rotten strawberries and tops, I
had to split a gallon of waste between three flocks to ensure it
would all get eaten. "No problem!" our Leghorn pullets
declared. "We can clean that up lickety-split!"
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Donna --- Good question! I like to make freezer jam instead because you don't have to cook the berries, so you get more of the berry taste. We don't make much jam, so we don't mind using up about 0.75 gallons worth of space for it.
The leather also wouldn't have to go in the freezer, but since it becomes so small (and lets me keep it for a year instead of a couple of months), I stick that in there too.
Elie --- No tricks, unfortunately, just obsessive hand-weeding and mulching.
Emily --- I'd say we have roughly 250 square feet of strawberries. That would be much more realistic if some of them were a late variety the way they are most years, which would spread the harvest out. If you're not a strawberry-aholic like me, you might want to start with about 50 square feet.