First Strawberry Harvest - June 2023

If you buy strawberry plants once, you'll have strawberries for years, they say.  We started with container-grown bareroot strawberry plants in 2018.  And, guess what?  They ESCAPED.  Now, we have Strawberry groundcover in one of our beds.  

Back in 2019 - I called them 'volunteer' strawberries and thought it was cute.  But, they they spread.  And spread.  I ripped some out.  They came back.  I ripped out more.  They came back.

But, we haven't eaten any of the strawberries in the years since they grew in 2019.  2020, 2021, 2022 were all strawberry-free years.  Why?  Well...we did *grow* strawberries.  But, they were gobbled up by the critters. 

This year, however is different.

In addition to leaving the strawberry groundcover in place, I also dug out eight plants and put them in our vertical Greenstalk tower.  After a period of transplant shock, they stabilized and began to throw off strawberries.

Between the two spots, I started to see some 'red' peeking through the foliage.  We went out to the backyard early one morning last week and started to cut them off the vine.  Here's our harvest:

These are "June Bearing" All-Star variety.  

And the Bird lined them all up from largest-to-smallest and the haul looks a bit more impressive:

That's 18 garden-fresh strawberries.  With more on the way.

#4 on my 2023 to-do list was to 'get more serious with vegetable gardening'.  Although these aren't, technically vegetables, I feel like this is a big moment in growing our own food.  We're back (sorta), baby!