Local Strawberries

The dewberries in the roadside ditch on the north side of the road in front of our house have been producing prolifically and we have been picking them, eating them, and freezing them according to the individual quick freezing process we showed you the other day.  Dewberries are great and then nice thing about them is we don't have to plant them, water them, weed them or fertilize them.  They grow wild and we are blessed to have them right outside our front door.

We don't have any strawberries planted this year in the garden.  We generally try to grow as many things that we eat as possible.  For those items that we don't grow, we try to purchase items locally grown.  Every year we try to purchase strawberries from the 4-H Club.  They sell berries that are grown over in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. Ponchatoula is a small town in Tangipahoa Parish that calls itself the strawberry capitol of the world.

Local Strawberries

These berries aren't the huge ones that you see in the grocery store, but they aren't small.  They are just a nice size.  The size isn't the most important thing here - its' the flavor.  When you take a bite of these, they are sweet and flavorful and are a beautiful red all the way through.

Delicious

When I put these in the car on my commute home, the strong fragrance of strawberries permeated the vehicle and I couldn't wait to get home and eat some.  We washed them and cut the green stem and leaves off the tops of the strawberries.  Then we laid them out on trays and froze them.  Once they were completely frozen, we poured them into gallon freezer bags.

We'll pull these out and make smoothies, pies, jelly, and other sweet delicacies.  So between the dewberries and strawberries, we've got a lot of berries in the freezer (and we haven't harvested our blueberries yet!)