Even though the technical name for strawberries that crop all at once is "June-bearing," our June-bearers are usually May-bearers.  This year's cool spring pushed the fruits forward in time, but even so, we're nearing the end of our harvest season.  Monday, I put the last load in the dehydrator (bringing us to over two gallons of strawberry leather preserved for winter), and ever since we've been gorging on a mere 3 quarts a day.

Next year, matters will be different because we'll once again have a late-bearing variety to join our early and midseason varieties.  I ordered 25 Sparkle strawberries from Nourse Farms and have been highly impressed by the plants' vigor.  The roots were about four times as large as those I got from Burgess last year, and the plants are already trying to bloom.  (I snip the flowers off so we'll get good crops next year.)

In the meantime, we're eating red raspberries, the first black raspberries, and are hoping the blueberries and gooseberries start to bear before the last strawberries disappear.  It's so sweet to have eaten no storebought fruit for weeks.

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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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