Strawberries Galore

We have had hundreds of strawberries in our gardens. This fine specimen was hanging out of the raised-bed garden we have at home, but we also have a plot at a nearby community garden that came with some mature strawberry plants that we have nurtured into a lush, productive patch. We go and water them every few days, and each time we go, we bring home a couple of pints of fresh berries. It's gotten to the point that we don't know what to do with them. They don't last as long in the refrigerator or on the counter as commercial strawberries would, but they are far more flavorful than the commercial varieties when eaten fresh. After having to throw some away that went old, we made one harvest into strawberry-mango popsicles, and my wife turned another harvest into a stawberry-mandarin jam, but the last time we were at the garden to water, we decided to just eat as many fresh on the spot as we could handle, because that's really the best way to eat them. 

We also planted and harvested a lot of Swiss chard at our community garden last year -- we ate chard until we were sick of it. It overwintered, but this year it's done nothing but produce bolts of flowers, so we planted a few fresh seeds in our raised bed at home and will probably replace the flowering plants at the community garden with some artichokes and other plants that my wife has sprouted at home. There's a neighboring gardener at the community garden who has some magnificent blackberry canes, and she was kind enough to give us some runners from her plants that will hopefully produce well next year. And there is a concord-style grape that we tend next to our plot - like the strawberries, it preceded us, but nobody else seems to "own" it, and it produces enough grapes for everyone who wants a few. 

One sticking point with the garden is that the parts we aren't actively growing in get clogged with weeds. My wife thinks it's better to let them grow, and keep them trimmed as a ground cover, than to try to keep up with pulling them all, but we are in the minority view of the community garden in that respect. We also had a bit of a slug and snail infestation for a while, but we seem to have mostly fixed that problem with pellets of a pesticide that claims to be "for organic gardening." And tending the garden is getting harder for her as her pregnancy progresses, so I am doing more of the bending over and picking. It's much easier for her to tend the raised bed at home, but we may keep the community garden another year at least. It's not expensive to rent, just a bit hard to get there as much as we should to take care of it.