According to my Old Farmer's Almanac, Wednesday's full moon was the Strawberry Moon. That is appropriate, for late June has always been strawberry time for me. Just as the seasons are turning from spring into summer (and the solstice is today), the strawberries come ripe and ready to pick. Every year while I was growing up and living at home we would go out to Carnation to a preferred U-pick strawberry patch and load up. The first time I took Benjamin along he commented that my dad and I could be migrant workers, for we picked so quickly and accurately. The day before our wedding we picked 60 pounds of strawberries in an hour or so. I found it profoundly disorienting when we moved to Texas and discovered that strawberries are ripe in March and early April. While it fit the seasons down there, it did not fit my ingrained, accustomed pattern of the year. And strawberries just are not natural in such hot, dry climates.They prefer sun, but sun mixed with cool rain and clouds.
Pre-wedding strawberries Brockport, however, is much more like Seattle, and it is now strawberry time. And so, we are going to go pick strawberries tomorrow - although I doubt we will get up to 60 pounds! (for one thing, we don't have an extra freezer to store them in, and for another, we don't have a wedding reception to stock.) There isn't much that can beat a fresh strawberry (except maybe a homegrown tomato, but not much else).
2 comments:
Strawberries up here are set to get good next week. I can barely stand waiting. I want to run out to the store right now and buy a huge box of them from California, even though I know they won't taste good. I want them.
No - don't do it - Do NOT buy the California berries! They will bring nothing but heartbreak!
Post a Comment