This is roughly the harvest every other day. Already have a gallon freezer bag full. No complaints here.
Carrots and peppers were kind of a wash last year so we just let the strawberries run rampant. They’re happy as hell and the fruits are have gotten bigger as the plants matured. The left side was clear enough to put beans where the tomato plants used to be. I was planning on skipping tomatoes as well because they got absurdly large and bent their cages, but some of the fallen ones must have seeded because we had 3 little tomato plants shooting up. They’re in separate pots now and hopefully that’ll be more manageable.
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How do you keep rabbits and squirrels from eating them?
No joke. I have a rather large bed and colony of plants and none of this tracks for my experience.
Also curious about this! Rabbits are stealing all our berries, and especially as the plants start taking over the beds
The squirrels eat the fallen seeds from the bird feeder, and the buns just haven’t shown up yet I guess. We have some netting we’re going to throw over the beds but thankfully no critter issues so far.
We used hula hoops, schedule 40 and some cheap netting. This was from early May i think.
Ooohh. I like that. Thank you for the great advice!
I always spend hours looking for fancy garden setups then give myself a 20 dollar budget and improvise lol
You can mix extremely hot hot sauce (my recommendation is Da Bomb Evolution)* and water and spray it in a wide arc on the ground/grass and on your plants. Most animals HATE spice and especially getting it on their paws, which they have to lick clean. One or two times of spice events, and they won’t come back for awhile. You can respray every few weeks to keep animals at bay. Just be sure to wear swim goggles and a mask, as it can pepperspray you too. Be sure to rinse your fruit before eating, of course. But ideally, you won’t even have to spray the actual fruit.
*A bunch of us did a big wing night challenge on a ski trip, and Da Bomb Evolution is far and away the most hot and horrible hot sauce. Not a great flavor, but extremely spicy as a novelty sauce.
How lovely! I recommend strawberry lemonade!
when life gives you lemons.
burn life’s house down! with lemons!
Ooh did not think of that. We have plans for jam but we definitely will have enough for lemonade as well.
Oh nice! No trouble with snails? I simply cannot have homegrown strawberries because snails and slugs get to them first.
None that I’ve seen so far
Lucky you! Bon apetit!
So we had this problem, and a plate/shallow saucer filled with beer placed in the bed with the strawberries will help. Slugs/snails will go for the beer instead of the strawberries and consequently get drunk and drown.
Haha, I’ve done this before. That was gross! There are far too many snails tho.
I have three massive gooseberry bushes. There is loads of gooseberries every year, and birds pick all of them off as soon as they ripen.
How do you get strawberry plants to produce so much?? My plant has produced a total of 15 strawberries over the course of 3 years. I want a harvest like yours. Maybe I need to get more plants?
Honestly no idea. We got a bundle or two that ended up being about 12 individual plants, tossed in a bunch of soil and mixed fertilizer into the top. First year they popped out maybe a dozen or so strawberries, but they also sent out runners and spread like crazy. We designated 1/3rd of the bed to them. End of season last year they had taken over about 1/2 or more of one bed and encroached into the second, and early this year they took off again and now own an entire bed and 2/3ds of the second one. We sprinkled some concentrated fertilizer across the beds and watered the shit out of them but nothing other than that.
Oh no what a tragedy, I can help dispose of the excess.
Damn, real nice
As it should be.
Make some homemade jam. It’s pretty easy if you don’t do a full canning and will use this up quickly
And if it’s too runny for whatever reason you have flavored simple syrup for cocktails 😄
If you have too much of that you can add liquor as a preservative to make your own cordial.
It’s funny how many delicious things are methods to save food when you grow too much
Oh that’s a great idea.
Continuing the thread to say: consider making shrubs from it, too! Basically sugar on fruit for a few days to draw out the juices, then mash it through a strainer, mix in vinegar, let sit for a couple of weeks and voila. So refreshing mixed with soda water and simple syrup. You can get as fancy with the recipes as you want. They’re very cool to do research on!
I’ve been making my own infused vinegars with herbs where you just let them sit together and strained. I was wondered how they made it with fruit. It makes sense to add sugar to turn fruits into juices.
P.S. to pedantic I was going to say that it isn’t a shrub until you add the soda water, until then its just an infused vinegar. But looking more into it both are shrubs.
Nice. I love strawberry season. Its the most magical 2 weeks of the year :)
Alright, how many have this exact collander? 😂✋
