It's Strawberry Season!

oh
yeah











These beauties are Plant City Strawberries from south of here. They were from a local fruit stand and even though their size is silly big, they were red all the way through and actually tasted like strawberries. What a great way to get your daily dose of red antioxidant nutrients.

Like other fruits, the strawberry harvest will move up the peninsula as the calendar progresses. Plant City is a big strawberry center with lots of farms. As their season begins to wane, the small town of Starke (up here in nawth Florida) will begin to come on line with their harvest.

Strawberries reproduce mostly by vegetative propagation. Essentially, the parent plant puts out runners that root where they touch the ground and produce new plants. These new plants are what you buy as bundles of strawberry "sets" at the feed store or nursery.

Eventually, the strawberry harvest will move beyond Florida and you snowbirds will be eating locally grown berries while ours are but a pleasant, distant memory.

In other "plants as prey" news, my carrots, mesclun mix, snow peas, spinach, and lettuce ( green ice and black seeded simpson) are all up and doing well. The collard transplants are only down by one (armadillo digging crushed it) and are getting bigger.

My blueberries have bloomed, but the earliest lost some blooms to a hard freeze about 10 days ago. That pretty apple blossom I posted a while back on the signs of spring post....frost killed.

Wild hog plums are aglow with white clouds of blossoms. Sparkleberry, redbuds, and jessamine are dressing up the woods.

On my black cherry trees, the tentworms showed up in tiny colonies about 4 days before the tender new black cherry leaves burst from their buds. Talk about timing your eggs!

Getting back to strawberries, I like 'em best just like in the picture...fresh and plain.

What's your favorite way to eat strawberries?