My strawberry patch looks awful. What little I planted this year has mostly dried due to way too warm and dry May. However I still have enough big strawberries – those damn plants infested the side of the vegetable patch and grow among grass and potatoes like mad. Annoying, truly, on oh so many levels.
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Well.
That’s not what I expected from the headline.
Those dank strawberries look delicious though. Are you going to bogart them?
Hah :)
But strawberries, they are delicious! Everything is a matter of perspective.
You don’t have to tell me that! I look at that photo and now I’m going to have to buy some produce after work.
Looks delish!
Humph, my feral strawbs grow these tiny deep red berries the size of my little finger nail, but pack a real punch in the taste department. Just takes ages to pick half a cup of the little beggars.
I’m hoping for the same problem with the mushroom bed I planted.
Oh, to have such problems! Enjoy.
Lofty
That’s the horrible weed that is taking over my front yard.
I have a similar garden that has been completely taken over by strawberries, feverfew, and peppermint. I tried to thin out some of the small scrappy berry plants so that sun can get to the fruit, but I should have headed my Nana’s advice to be ruthless with them. She ran a tiller through the patch every year to take out either a side strip, or a walkway through the middle. Berry picking smells fabulous, but I don’t think I actually planted any peppermint on that side of the yard.
Lofty -- I didn’t know about feral strawberries in Australia! One of my colleagues studies strawberry genetics, where the common northern-hemispheric woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca) is a very important model species. That’s very likely what both you and Giliell have.
There are many species of wild strawberry, most found in Asia. Two species, F. vesca and F. moschata, are native in Europe, where they were historically highly valued and often cultivated. Then, the Europeans were quite impressed when they acquired some species from Americas, that had considerably larger fruit. These gave rise to the modern garden strawberry, in which breeders have developed increasingly massive fruits.
There were some small, wild strawberry plants on our property at one time, tiny strawberries, and if you could find one the birds hadn’t been at, very tasty. They didn’t thrive here though, there are much meaner weeds out there. The bane on our property is effing bindweed.