Fresh Strawberries

This afternoon the girls and I sampled the first few of our homegrown strawberries!  Unfortunately, I think our neighborhood bunny rabbit beat us to the first two, prompting my panicked call to Michael yesterday to stop at Home Depot for chicken wire on the way home! 

I am so over-the-top excited about these berries.  To me, there is something even more exciting and mysterious about homegrown fruit than about homegrown vegetables.  As much as I love fresh veggies, they are the workhorses of the family meal - the sensible green salad or steamed side dish.  But fruit, on the other hand, with its succulent sweetness, is another whole level up.  And berries . . . they are the jewels on the crown of produce!

The history of our homegrown strawberries is neat, too.  Two years ago this spring, just after we moved into our house, I received some plants from a generous gardener on Freecycle.  She gave me my mint, which has spread each year in epic proportions, prompting many offers of my own excess on Freecycle.  She also threw in one strawberry plant.

I had the plant in a pot for the past two years,  and it flowered, but never actually produced fruit.  Last year, after strawberry season, I planted it in the ground in a small bed next to my porch.  There, it sent out a ton of runners and filled up the bed.  And this year, the healthy-looking plants are producing small but healthy and bright red berries!

Those berries we tasted this afternoon had that amazing, sunshiny taste that I associate with fresh strawberries.  They are seriously practically a different fruit than the store-bought variety.  I bought some California strawberries at the grocery store this week, since they were good price, and my girls adore them.  However, they tasted more like gargantuan red pieces of styrofoam, flavored with a mildly pleasant strawberry flavoring!

When I was a child, we several times traveled to South Carolina in May to pick strawberries.  Since there were so many kids to pick berries, we literally came home with bushels of them.  We ate them nonstop for days, and my mom froze many and baked everything strawberry.  I'll have to share the recipe for her yummy refrigerated strawberry pie some day!

We also might visit a u-pick farm in the next few weeks, as our few plants will not satiate the voracious appetite for fruit around here.  I'm so glad my girls will have a similar childhood memory of that uniquely sweet taste of fresh-picked berries, and some this time from their own garden!