An Easy Spring Dessert

We are right smack dab in the middle of the best strawberry harvest we've ever had.  Very early in the year I planted some bare root strawberries - a ten foot row of them in the very back of the garden by the sugar cane.  They have thrived!  In past years, we struggled because the slugs and snails would eat them before we could harvest them.  A nice lady from our church gave me a plastic shopping bag full of crushed up egg shells to sprinkle around the base of the plant (see below).  She told me that the sharp eggshells cut the slugs undersides when they slide to eat strawberries and die.  I did what she told me, and it appears to work!  

She then told me if the eggshells don't work, that there is another remedy for slugs.  Beer!  She told me to put plastic lids filled with beer around the strawberry plants.  The slimy critters are attracted to the scent, climb in and drown.  I have not tried this eradication option yet.  The last thing I need is a bunch of partying, drunken slugs and snails loitering in the garden.  That doesn't sound safe.

Each morning we can expect to get a handful like this.  I bring them in and Tricia makes us a nice strawberry breakfast smoothie with goat milk and our honey.

I'm going to share a new recipe we tried today that's a keeper: Honey-Lime Macerated Strawberries (a recipe from The School of Traditional Skills.)  Check 'em out!  

So macerated was a new vocabulary word for me.  It means softened while sitting in a liquid.  The acidity of the lime in this recipe pulls out the juice from the strawberries.  Here's what you need:

1 lb fresh strawberries

1 TBS Local Raw Honey

1 Lime zested and juiced

5-6 fresh mint leaves

Wash up the berries that just came out of the garden and pick the mint leaves and wash.

Cut up the strawberries in a glass bowl.  Drizzle the honey, lime juice and lime zest over the berries and stir to coat.

Here's where our new vocabulary word goes to work.  If you let the bowl of berries sit for 15-20 minutes at room temperature the berries soften and a bright red syrup will collect at the bottom of the bowl.  You might call it a maceration sensation.

When it's about time to serve, chiffonade your fresh mint leaves over the top and stir in.

After church we ate a nice meal and put coffee on.  We each fixed a little bowl with this easy spring dessert to go along with our coffee.

What a treat it was!  All the ingredients (except the limes, doggonit) were harvested right off of our land.  That makes it special - almost as special as the taste!  We'll keep this recipe and make more of this before the strawberry harvest ends.

If At First You Don't Succeed...

I don't know if you're like us, but things don't always work out the way we planned.  Try as we may, our best laid plans often go awry.  One example is strawberries.  It's always a nice thought to be able to pick bowls of strawberries to snack on or two blend up in a breakfast smoothie.  More times than not, though, if we want to do that, we have to buy the strawberries.  What a shame, too!  I had read that strawberries is one of the fruits that have the most chemicals sprayed on them.

In years prior, as the berries were ripening and almost ready for picking, and then the next morning we go out to pick them and slugs will have eaten big holes in them.  To combat that, a lady in our church saved egg shells all year long for us, crushing them into tiny flakes that you sprinkle around the strawberries as a slug deterrent.  It worked!  But our berries just didn't produce.  Last year on our 7 strawberry plants, I think we harvested a total of 7 strawberries.  Not good.

But we don't give up easily.  We ordered some bare root strawberries again and planted them in the back of the garden.  When the bare root strawberries come in the mail, you simply soak the roots for an hour and then you are ready to plant them.

This year we're planting them in the very back of the garden near the sugarcane.  When you plant, you want to bury all the roots, but leave the leaves and crown uncovered.  In just a few days, you'll see fresh green growth.

This year, I'll add more compost and be more judicious in watering and mulching.  I will also read more publications on success in growing strawberries and try to implement any growing tips we learn.  They say the third time's a charm, but I'm not superstitious.  We'll report back our successes (or failures) and what we learn from our attempts at growing strawberries.

Bare Root Strawberries Are In!

It's our second year planting bare root strawberries that we ordered on-line.  Last year we had about 22 plants.  I was disappointed in the yield.  We were also plagued by slugs.  Those slimy critters found the berries before we could pick them and ate them up.  More on that in a minute.  This year, until we have a better process for growing them in place, we only ordered 5 plants.  In an act of kindness, the nursery in Oregon that we ordered them from included 7 plants.  Don't you love to get a little lagniappe?

They are called bare root strawberries because they come in a bag with no soil - just the bare roots.  Somehow they survive.  You would think that the roots would dry out, but they come moist and healthy, with a green leaf peeking out near the crown of the plant.

The directions say to unpack the plants and let them re-hydrate in a 5 gallon bucket of rainwater.  That's exactly what we did.

Then we planted them in moistened, loose garden soil.  I'm always surprised in how fast they perk up after being shipped across the country.

Back to the issue of slugs.  We have many gardeners that attend our small country church.  Last year I was lamenting with a kind lady at church about our slug dilemma.  She said, "I've got just the thing for you, Kyle."  Next Sunday at church, she handed me a grocery bag, tied off at the top.  It was heavy.  I'm not exaggerating when I tell you it weighed 5 pounds.  I opened it up and looked at the contents:

A bag of cleaned, crushed eggshells.  She told me that she uses the eggshells to construct a sort of barrier around her strawberries.  "Tell me more," I said.  She instructed me to crush the eggshells up a little bit and "mulch" around each strawberry plant with the eggshells.  The resulting barrier creates a suicidal mission for slugs attempted to feast on our berries.  When the slimy slugs crawl over the eggshells, it cuts up their underbellies, causing them to dry up and die.  A macabre end for the slugs, but if it works, it will result in a more successful strawberry crop.  After a week, our strawberries are green, happy and sporting their first blooms.  Those will translate into berries.  You can see how I've built a sharp slug barrier around the plant.

Here you can see the small strawberry patch and if you look closely, the white dusting around each plant is the eggshell mulch.

I like to try new things.  In a week or so, we'll be able to see if it works.  I'll keep you posted.  While I was reading about this, I learned that if you do the same thing to tomato plants, the eggshells act as slow-release calcium and help combat blossom end rot.  With a full 5 pound bag of eggshells, I had enough to do the same thing around every tomato plant.  

One other thing about strawberries while we're talking, I read on a garden forum that people were having another problem in their strawberry patch - birds.  Pesky birds see the bright red succulent strawberries, and they just can't resist.  They swoop down and peck and the red strawberries and eat them up.  Their solution?  They found round stones in their driveway approximately the same size as strawberries, and they painted the stones bright red.  The birds see the red "strawberries," swoop down, and begin pecking at them.  Except they aren't strawberries, they're red stones.  This hurts the birds beak and they'll quickly give up and leave the strawberries alone..  Now, that's a sneaky trick!  We will update you later, regarding the success with the eggshells and the red painted stones.

Spring is a Berry Nice Time of Year

There is an old saying around here that says, "It's not officially spring until the pecan trees bud out."  Well, here we go!:

Speaking of pecans, I've finally gotten around to shelling the 2 five gallon buckets of pecans we collected underneath our trees.  Tricia took them to our feed store here in town and they crack them.  I like to sit and mindlessly shell the pecans.  They freeze nicely, so we have gallons of pecans frozen, waiting to be turned into pies and such.

I wanted to show you the strawberries.  We've planted strawberries in the past.  I'd like to say we had success growing them, but no, I'd be telling you a tall tale.  In years past slugs would eat them before we could get to them.  I decided to try again this year.  I ordered 22 bare root strawberry plants.  They looked very strange, almost dead, when they arrived.  I planted them, ensuring that the crowns were above ground and they began growing immediately.  We had fresh, green growth the very next day.  

Soon, we began to see blooms and little berries.

It was a beautiful sight to behold.  Right there in amongst the sweet potatoes were red, ripe strawberries.

Each morning, we gather a handful of fresh strawberries and wash them, chill them, and snack on them.  I've got to say they are very sweet.  Even Russ, who is not real big on compliments, told us that they are some of the sweetest he's ever eaten.  The variety is called Ozark Beauty.

So far, the slugs have NOT been eating them.  I was prepared for that.  Someone told me that the remedy for slugs in the garden is beer.  I was told that if you pour a saucer of beer and set it down in the strawberry patch, slugs are attracted to it, fall in the beer and drown.  But no slugs have bellied up to the bar yet.

One thing we have had is Birds eating on the berries.  A few have holes where the birds peck at them.  If this continues, we have a net that we can string out over the strawberries to protect them.  I was also told to make some "strawberry rocks" and scatter around in the berry patch.  Strawberry rocks are ordinary round stones that you paint red and place around the base of the plants.  As the story goes, birds arrive to eat berries and instead are fooled and peck into a hard, red rock.  They soon get discouraged and give up.  Interesting strategy.  We'll see how that works out.  Strawberries have a difficult time with slugs and birds and other pests.  That's why strawberries are the crop that you always read about that have more pesticides on them than anything else on the produce aisle.

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!)

We had a BERRY good day

The boys and I made plans to drive Russ' truck to Oberlin to pick up the cattle trailer.  We need it to bring Stryker to the sale.  I'll talk more about that escapade tomorrow.  We loaded up fishing poles, drinking water, and a sack of fresh dug potatoes to bring to my Mom and Dad and we hit the road.

We arrived in Oberlin at the farm in about 30 minutes and Mom & Dad were there with five of my sister's six boys.  I got out a sling blade and cleaned up an area on the bank of the pond and the boys fished for a while.  They didn't get any bites, but had a great time with a BB gun shooting snakes and turtles swimming in the pond.  I remember doing the exact same thing 35 years ago or so in the same exact spot.  Whoa, is my math right?  I think it is - unfortunately.

After the boys were out of BBs, we got a bucket and all went blackberry picking.  What a sight to see.  Seven boys picking blackberries, depositing most of them in little mouths stained black from eating them.  The few that weren't eaten on the spot were collected in a Sonic cup, hands, and baseball caps turned upside down and then were poured into the community bucket, which happened to be a cat food container.  (We make do with what we've got.)


Blackberries

When I was a little boy we foraged around the same fence rows picking blackberries.  The blackberry bushes have stickers that will tear you up if you're not careful.  You also have to keep a watchful eye out for wasp nests and snakes.  I remember getting stung by wasps and there was a man named Joe that worked for my dad that would spit out his chewing tobacco and put it on the wasp sting as a remedy to take away the stinging sensation.  I'm assuming the nicotine acts as a local anesthetic, maybe?  It seemed to work.  Anyway, the reward of the bounty of blackberry picking was that my great grandmother would make delicious blackberry pies with sweetdough crusts.  She'd make a 'white sauce' to pour on top of the pie that was absolutely delicious.  Any blackberries left over would be frozen, except my great grandmother didn't us ziploc bags.  She would freeze them in Evangeline Maid bread bags.

One other thing about this treat that I recall is that me, my brother, my sister and my cousin would all eat a slice or two of homemade blackberry pie with white sauce and chase it down with a cold drink.  My grandmother always had "Shasta" drinks in assorted flavors like lemon-lime, cola, grape, orange, black cherry, ginger ale, root beer, or my favorite, strawberry - we called it Pop Rouge.  On a hot summer day the drinks would be sooo cold because of these aluminum drinking glasses that my grandmother had:

You would drop a few ice cubes in those bad boys and they would make the drink so cold that your lips would practically stick to the aluminum cup when you tried to drink from it.  Did any of you have these cups?  Man I remember those things.  After eating a piece of pie and drinking an ice cold Pop Rouge, you were good to go again and could go back outside and run around until you were good and sweaty and tired. We didn't need 'Energy Drinks' back in those days.  Well, I guess the sugar in the sodas effectively gave us the same rush.  

Here is a good shot of my sister's little boy (We'll call him Huck Finn) after a big day of blackberry picking and eating.  He was a very dedicated picker and eater.  If he's smile, his purple tongue would attest to this.



Huck Finn with a bucket of fresh picked blackberries

We got the cattle trailer home and as I was walking in I saw a red ripe strawberry on one of our strawberry plants.  I picked it to bring inside to wash it and eat it.

Strawberry

Good thing I turned it over before popping it in my mouth.  A slug was enjoying my strawberry.



Someone beat me to it!

You gotta act fast around here.  If you aren't on your toes, there are numerous birds, slugs, bugs and other critters that will gladly eat the fruits of your labors.


Where's that salt shaker?

All in all though, it was a BERRY good day!

Local Strawberries & Goat Milk Ice Cream

Over in Southeast Louisiana, in a town called Ponchatoula, they grow strawberries - wonderful strawberries.  Not as big as the California berries, but tasty and sweet and perfectly ripened.  The local 4-H club was selling flats of them and we purchased a flat.  They told us that they were picked the very morning we bought them.  Judging from the quality, this wasn't an exaggeration.  Check out these bad boys:


Fresh picked local strawberries!

Here's a scenic overlook:


Not a bad one in the bunch - perfection!

What will we do with all these strawberries?  Why, we'll eat them, of course!  We wash them, cut out the green leaves and stem and then lay them single-spaced on trays and freeze individually.  Then we'll bag them in gallon freezer bags, enabling you to reach in and grab as many as you'd like.  We'll make smoothies, strawberry milk, homemade strawberry pie, eat them plain...  Well, you get it, the possibilities are endless.  We have a few strawberry plants of our own and have eaten berries off of them this Spring.  However, we don't have enough of our own to satisfy us.

Here's what we did with them the first night.  Nellie, our Nubian milk goat, recently delivered little Annie, and is producing fresh milk.


Nellie and her little kid, Annie

Tricia has been milking Nellie and making Goat milk kefir and we've been drinking her milk, too.  It is a little different from cow's milk, but not a drastic difference.  Tonight Tricia decided to make some homemade goat milk ice cream.  I've never eaten goat milk ice cream. 

Milking Nellie

Here is a nice bowl of ice cream made from goat milk, topped with fresh chopped strawberries and garnished with a sprig of mint.  Looks great, huh?  It was absolutely delicious.  There's none left.
 

Bowl of homemade goat milk ice cream



I've got to admit that at first, I was a little leery about drinking goat milk.  I've tasted and enjoyed goat cheese, but never goat milk.  After drinking a strawberry-fig goat kefir smoothie this morning and then having a bowl of this delicious ice cream, I guess I'm sold on it now.


I scream, you scream, we all scream for goat ice cream