Strawberry Success

During World War II, my family had a Victory Garden and after my dad got off work, we would all pile in our tiny car and drive out to it and work in the dirt while there was yet light. I became an enthusiastic gardener in those days (I was almost 5 when Pearl Harbor was bombed), and after the war, when we bought a house with an acre of gardening land, I came into my own as a gardener. Southeastern Idaho has heavy, clay soil and precious little rain, but irrigation ditches are provided and things will grow. My father gave me total responsibility for the strawberry bed and I worked it, ate and sold its fruits, and went to summer camp for an extra week each summer on its profits.

But my strawberry growing days ended when I left that house. There were a few plants here and there, but nothing like that large original bed until four years ago when we bought the lot adjoining our house. There, I found six formerly-producing raised strawberry beds. Alas, they were in disastrous shape, filled with as many weeds as strawberry plants, the wooden surrounds begin to rot out, the ground sodden all spring. I worked the first spring just to get the weeds cleaned out (bindweed, buttercups, and various grasses, all destined to reemerge from the winter’s gloom, year after year). Once I had actually found the plants and brought them into the light, I realized that three of the beds actually weren’t in the light because a willow tree had grown so large as to send them into perpetual shade. So I gave up on those. The other three beds produced few flowers and no edible berries.

Then, in the second year, I had three raised beds. I weeded them, I fertilized them, I improved their wooden surrounds, I kept track of the poor drainage--which their raised bed status helped considerably—I talked to them companionably, and in year two, they bloomed, fruited, and showed great promise. I left them alone in late June just as the fruits were beginning to show a red blush and returned, two weeks later, to find them all chewed up by slugs and sow bugs.

By year three, I had found a 10-inch wide roll of copper mesh to wrap around the edges of the three beds. Slug slime and copper produce a slight electric charge that, wisely, slugs avoid. I got it on in early spring, hoping that the beds weren’t already full of slugs that now, couldn’t get out of the strawberry beds. I did the routine: fertilizer, weeding, and cheerful conversation, and strawberries began to appear. No sign of slug damage, although I hadn’t yet defeated the sow bugs. After the reliable two week absence in late June, I returned to find all the strawberries eaten by raccoons. But, even the raccoon leavings showed no signs of slugs.

For year four, I improved the copper mesh coverage (no slugs), spread straw generously around and under each plant (no sow bugs), bought nets to cover the beds (no raccoons), and talked non-stop to the plants. I didn’t really expect much from it because we had record rains all this spring and the plants were now virtually hydroponically grown, at least as far as their roots were concerned: the plants themselves, though, were sitting well up on the straw (perhaps from this comes the word ‘straw-berries’?).

After the rains, came heat and no rain. Two weeks of heat and three weeks of no rain, that famous two weeks that I am gone turned this year into three weeks. I expected to return to find the plants dried up and the berries dried up with them. But on getting here, there were bright red berries all over the beds. Success! I have gathered this past week about 3 pounds of strawberries and we have eaten them with great pleasure. They, of course, bear no resemblance to what the stores up here sell, those large, hard, beautifully-shaped, beautifully-colored (on the outside; white on the inside), items referred to as California Strawberries. Ours are smaller, juicier, more flavorful, somewhat misshapen, reminiscent of the ones I grew sixty+ years ago, but they are our own and I love them. My dad would be proud of them and me. And if I paid myself commensurately for the pleasure of eating them, I could surely afford an extra week—maybe two--at camp.