It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I love strawberry season. It is backbreaking, hand-staining, delicious and all-too-brief. Anyone who has only ever had those giant, flavorless, mid-winter strawberries from the grocery store has never had a real strawberry. My Earliglow, June-bearing strawberries are in their second productive year (planted spring 2006) and I'm hoping to harvest for at least two more years before I pull them up and begin harvesting from new beds I am planning to put in next year. This time last week, I picked my first scant quart of berries, some of which were not quite all red but by the next morning had improved in their looks. The rest of the week, I saved up almost all of the berries as a special treat for my daughter's Brownie troop for our camping trip. It was music to my ears to hear all of those eight-year old compliments about how sweet and tasty they were. Right now, I have about 4 quarts waiting to be picked.

My strawberries generally have been very prolific, and although you are supposed to tame those runners the plants put out during the growing season, I have been loathe to pull out any of them. As a result, picking strawberries from the mat of plants covering my 8 x 8-foot raised beds requires a kind of acrobatics. Oh, it's easy enough to pick those tantalizing ones hanging over the edges--the birds go for those first too, getting them right through the netting--but the ones in the center can be a challenge. My technique is to work each foot in between plants to find a bare patch of soil, then bend and crouch to pick without shifting or moving my feet. It is most convenient to have my children or a helper nearby, to whom I occasionally holler and ask them to take full quart after quart and give me empty ones so I don't have to climb back out. I picked well over two gallons each day over the course of three days last year.

My back and my calves begin to complain after a half hour or so in this position, but there are just so many berries hiding that you ignore the cramps in a picking frenzy. Pull back the tops of the glossy green plants and there are three times as many as those peeking out from the edges. To let even one rot on the ground because it was left unpicked seems like a sin. Unlike asparagus, snap peas and even cucumbers, we never seem to tire of having strawberries on a daily basis. Last year, I put up over 40 pints of strawberry jam--enough to give away and still have plenty for PB & J sandwiches all year. I like to freeze whole berries on sheet trays, then bag them up to use in yogurt smoothies and to add to applesauce in the fall.

But by far the biggest treat is my mother's Strawberry Pie. It has a graham cracker crust, with a cream cheese filling, topped by whole fresh strawberries and a strawberry glaze. I remember making it for my husband on one of our first Valentine's Days together. Even though it was made with pale ghosts of real strawberries in February, I still think it helped me seal my place in his heart. Making strawberry pie requires some hard work, and a lot of patience. The crust, filling and glaze are made from scratch. You have to search for about 25 perfect, medium-sized strawberries to adorn the top in a circle or spiral design. But the hardest part is that even after all is made and put together, you have to let it sit in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours if not over night so that the filling and glaze can firm up. More than once, we have cut into freshly-made strawberry pie and ignored the filling and glaze spilling out onto the pie plate. Tastes just as good, even when it looks like slop.

Here is Mom's recipe, along with her graham cracker crust. I'll post a picture as soon as I make my first pie this weekend!

Strawberry Pie

8 oz. cream cheese, softened
1 c. strawberries, chopped
1 c. sweetened condensed milk
1/2 c. confectioner's sugar
1/3 c. lemon juice (2)
1 c. water
1 tsp. vanilla
3/4 c. sugar
1 T. cornstarch
approx. 30 whole strawberries

Whip cream cheese until fluffy; add sweetened condensed milk, lemon juice and vanilla. Pour
into cooked graham cracker crust. Chill 3 hours or over night.
Mix whole strawberries with confectioner's sugar; let stand. Cook berries with water; press
through sieve. Mix sugar and cornstarch; add to strained strawberry mixture. Cook until clear.
Pour thickened strawberry mixture over cream cheese layer of pie. Top with whole strawberries,
pointed end up.

Graham Cracker Crust:

20 graham squares
1/4 c. butter
1/4 c. sugar

Roll graham crackers into fine crumbs. Mix with sugar and butter and press into pie plate. Bake at 375 for about 8 minutes.

Strawberry season should be like childhood, sweet and full of simple, delicious memories. Enjoy it while it lasts, and take every opportunity to revisit it whenever you can.

© 2008 Jenifer Dolde

There's a Bog in My Backyard

"So you like an adventure," the friendly guy at the landscaping materials place said to me last week as I paid for a half a yard of sand and explained my project. He loaded my small pickup with a scant scoop and stopped to ask if I could handle more. "Sure," I nodded. My husband had put heavy-duty springs on the shocks so we could carry heavier loads. I heard a little scrape as I drove out of the bumpy yard. "Just the mud flaps," I told myself until I pulled out onto the street and the dragging sound rose to a high-pitched screech. It didn't sound like mud flaps. I stopped at the bank and looked under the truck. Nothing appeared to be touching the ground. I drove home at about 35 m.p.h. and hoped I wasn't irreparably damaging our poor, rusty 16-year old truck. Yeah, I like an adventure. The truck made it home, and I never did tell my husband.

One of the problems with ordering seeds and plants in February is that in the euphoria that comes with imagining all of the things you will eat from your garden and all the things that will bloom outside your door, you are tempted into buying the exotic and the unusual. Almost two weeks ago, a large box arrived with the UPS driver and I couldn't figure out what it could be. Too big for the sweet potatoes. How many buckwheat seeds did I order? As I opened the box, I saw lovely, dark red and green boxwood-sized leaves, and an instruction sheet on "Growing Cranberries." I was surprised, but excited. We drink cranberry juice almost exclusively at our house, and I relish (pun intended) making homemade sauce every Thanksgiving. I remember a family trip to New England when I was a child and we visited Ocean Spray Cranberry World in Plymouth. My fascination with the harvester foreshadowed my career in farm history. What fun!

Later that night, I saw my experienced gardener-friend Jim and told him excitedly, "I'm going to plant cranberries!" He looked at me a little skeptically, "Don't you have to plant those in a bog?" I had done some research, so I said, "No, I think they just grow them in low-lying areas to flood the area and make the harvest easier." Jim appeared to have full confidence that I knew what I was doing. That night, I sat down after the kids went to bed to read the planting instructions. "Replace soil with a 50/50 mixture of peat moss and coarse, sharp sand." Replace? Dig out the soil? "Add bonemeal, bloodmeal, Epsom salts and rock phosphate to the mixture and mix in well." What the heck is rock phosphate (I'm still not sure, I read that I could substitute bonemeal, so that's what I did)?

I bought the peat the next day. The next three days it rained, which might explain why by the time I picked up the sand it was twice as heavy--it was water-logged. I found my soil additives and took a trip to the pharmacy to find Epsom salts. Then, I set about building a raised bed; I was not about to dig a 4 x 4-foot 6-inch hole. I have developed what I think is a pretty easy technique for building raised beds after some experimenting. The materials include joist hangers for 2 x 6 lumber (less than $1) and 2 x 8-inch untreated boards. Whenever possible, I try to reuse old lumber, and we had a few pieces left from a garage renovation that provided my two beds for lettuce earlier this spring.

I thought I had the lumber and joist hangers on hand. Turns out, the hangers were too big and the lumber was only 2 x 6. Nevertheless, I cut two pieces of what I had to size with the circular saw and borrowed a couple of larger boards from the pallets we stack our firewood on. I gathered all of the parts and prepared to drill, only to find my husband had taken the drill to work that day. With the schoolbus due at any moment, I gave up. The next day, Carl helped me get the frame together and helped me shovel the sand as I layered in peat. There was enough sand to fill the raised bed, the sandbox and make a pile about the same size under our pine trees.

I "mixed" the peat, sand and soil amendments together as best I could, and wet it down. Did I mention that peat absorbs water about as well as asphalt? Can anything grow in this? My daughter's friend arrived to play. He has grandparents in Maine. His Mom admired the garden and asked what I was planting. "Cranberries," I admitted, not so confidently. "You can grow those around here?" I sighed. "You sure do like to experiment," she said. A costly and time-consuming experiment, perhaps.

So goes the first chapter in the saga of The Cranberry Experiment. Only time will tell if it will follow the same course as the Great Pea Failure of 2008.

© 2008 Jenifer Dolde