My New Favorite Treat

Literally the day after I canned the strawberry jam, I couldn't wait to bust a jar open and taste the fruits of my labor.  Hello homegrown, homemade organic strawberry jam.  You are my new favorite treat!

For more Garden to Table food ideas, check out Greenish Thumb!

Homemade is the Best!

Since I was away last week, I am so behind with posting on this blog.  I have to catch up with what's been happening here that I haven't had the time to write about.  Before I went away, I made a batch of strawberry jam with the 6 pounds of strawberries that I harvested from the garden.  I was storing the strawberries in the freezer until I had time to make jam.  I wanted to have the jam ready to give away to my 2 sisters and brother since they were coming to visit for a mini-family reunion.  I defrosted the strawberries and it released a lot of juices.

I took a potato masher and smashed the berries.  I looked up many different recipes for strawberry jam and all of them called for so much sugar!  I asked some friends and they said that it should be okay to lessen the amount of sugar, but it would mean that it wouldn't set as well.  So I ended up using the following recipe. 
5 cups of sqooshed strawberries
5 cups of sugar
3 tablespoons of lemon juice
1 box of pectin

Cook ingredients all together until it was a rapid boil, then boil for 1 minute.  I tried to scoop up all the foam on top of the jam before putting it into the cans, however, it was hard to get all the foam, so the first few jars are foamy on top.  I'll just have to live with it.

All the jars went into a hot water bath and was processed for 10 minutes.  One batch of jam made 3 pint jars and two 8 ounce jars.  I tasted the jam and it's outstanding.  Yum!  It's too bad I didn't have any bread in the house!  This jam is so good that I will never buy store bought ever again!!  I might have to figure out a way to plant more strawberry plants, it's how much I loved this stuff!

For more Garden to Table creations, check out Greenish Thumb's GTTC!

Free Plants!

I noticed that our strawberry plants are sending out runners like crazy again. It's a great way to get "free plants". I clipped some of the runners and planted them, hoping that some of them will get root bound.

This one already had roots forming!

And this one!

One more!

I was able to get four potted, I'll have to see if the roots take to the soil.  If so, I will give these away!

 

Sometimes clipping the runners don't take to soil well, so I also put pots of soil under the live plants, and stick the runners in the soil, in hopes that they will get rootbound.

Strawberries are such great perennials!  Not only do they grow back, they reproduce like mad!  I'd say they are pretty invasive the way they send out runners!  I'm so happy with the fruit production of these strawberry plants, that I don't even mind if they take over my entire yard!  LOL.

Harvest Monday

This is what I harvested over the weekend.  I think this is probably the last of the strawberries.  We did really well, harvesting just under 6 pounds of strawberries.  It would have been more, had I known the bugs would go to town on my ripe yummy berries.  Next year, I will definitely go to battle with the bugs by using a good dosage of food grade Diatomaceous Earth. This week's plan is to make some strawberry jam.  I'm also starting to harvest the first of the radishes.  I love how cute they are!

I sowed all the radish seeds at the same time, however, it seems like they are all growing at their own pace.  It's funny how some radishes grow faster than others.  Some were ready for the picking and others hadn't quite developed a bulb yet.  Strange.  This is where I am growing my radishes.  They are growing in between the 5 raspberry plants.  I want a steady supply of radishes so I've been sowing new seeds everytime I harvest the ready ones.  It's too bad I hate the taste of radishes, thank goodness the hubs likes them.  I only like to eat radish greens.  If my husband didn't eat radishes, I would definitely grow these just for the greens!!

Check out Daphne's Dandelions to see what others are harvesting!

Frozen Strawberries

I've been steadily collecting about a half pound of strawberries from the garden bed every day.  I'm really pleased with the harvest despite losing at least half of the berries to bugs.  Stupid bugs.  This was yesterday's harvest, all cleaned up and trimmed and ready for the freezer.

My gallon bag of frozen strawberries is just about full.  I think I will make strawberry jam next week.  Woo hoo, so excited!  Does anyone have a good recipe for strawberry jam?  I looked up the recipe in my Bernardin Complete Book of Home Preserving and it calls for 7 cups of sugar for 5 cups of strawberries.  That sounds like an awful lot of strawberry, my teeth is hurting already just thinking about it. 

Strawberry Jam, Here I Come

The strawberries are turning red and getting ripe. I love seeing all this red, in a sea of green leaves. I am a bit frustrated though because every other strawberry I go to pick off the plant has bites in them from bugs.  How incredibly annoying and frustrating!

If it's not bugs, we have other pests like squirrels and birds.  I found 3 strawberries at the other side of the garden near the pole beans, a whole 20 feet away!  What the hell!

Whoever ate this enjoyed it I'm sure.  Why it didn't eat the whole thing, I have no clue.  Stupid pests!

It is nice to see a few perfect strawberries amongst all the ruined ones.  I would like to see more perfect ones though.  Today, I'm going to the hardware store to pick up some Diatomaceous Earth to sprinkle all over the ground.  I want to kill all those stinky bugs that are ruining my harvest.  It's war you stupid bugs, eat while you can, because I'm out to get you.

I did manage to harvest 1.5 pounds of strawberries.  Don't these look just amazing?

Since I didn't have enough berries yet to make jam with, I cleaned all the berries and threw them into a freezer bag. I'll freeze them until I have enough berries to make a nice batch of strawberry jam.  Oooh I can hardly wait.

First Harvest of 2011

 I picked these strawberries today which marks the first harvest of 2011. So exciting!! I was a bit bummed though because there were about the same amount of ripe berries eaten by bugs. I was so worried about birds and squirrels stealing my berries that I completely forgot about the stinky insects that liked them too. I put bird nettimg over the plants not realizing that I had a bunch of insects to contend with. I sqooshed a pill bug and a hairy looking caterpillar that were munching away on my gorgeous berries. What should I do to prevent the bugs grom eating more berries? Should I pick the berries as soon as I see a flush of pink, prior to it being completely ripe??  Will they turn red after picking?  Any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated. Organic gardening sure is hard. No wonder organic produce costs so much more!

Berry, Berry Good!

We planted 25 roots of Strawberries last year. I'm guessing we have more than 25 plants now in the bed because they sent out runners like crazy. I saw some birds stalking the berries the other day, so we bought bird netting and covered the entire bed.  We tied the netting to the picket fence.  I really hope this deters the birds.  Do you use bird netting?  Does it help?

I saw that there are lots and lots of berries growing. I can't wait until they start turning red!  I don't know if I'll have enough berries to make a jam, but I definitely want to make a strawberry syrup for pancakes and ice cream.  Oooh, berry, berry, good!

Dreaming of Strawberry Jam

For the next couple of blog posts, I'll be writing about all the perennial edible plants we planted last year. I'm a bit of a lazy gardener, so perennials are my favorites.  With such little care, they come back year after year.  The flowers are a blooming on the Everbearing Strawberry plants. These plants are a year old, so this will be our first year to harvest berries!   I can't wait for the fruit to start producing. The plants are so healthy and there are lots of flowers!  We also bought bird netting to cover the strawberry bed, hopefully that will deter any critters.

Home grown strawberries are so much sweeter than their store counterparts.  I can't wait to try some!  I hope we have enough strawberries to make some jam with.  Ooooh, jam!

What I did in-between meetings today.

Two years ago, I was let go from the company I worked at. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, although at the time, I didn't know it yet. After my bout of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to start my own graphic and web design business, and I have not looked back. Losing my job was the kick in the butt to become a new business owner. So in a way, I guess I have to thank my old boss for being such a jerk. Haha. I love working for myself, but I've learned that one must be very disciplined. Especially when you work from home. This morning I had 2 early morning conference calls, and in between calls, I needed a mental break. So I decided to clean out the strawberry bed. It was a mess from all the leaves that had fallen into the garden. Unfortunately for us, our garden is surrounded by deciduous trees. Therefore every autumn, leaves fall right into the fenced in garden area. This is what the strawberry bed looked like before I cleaned it.

And this.  Leaves everywhere!  I hate it when the garden looks like this, but we kept the leaves in the bed to protect and insulate the strawberry plants from the winter.  And what a winter we had!  It's been raining a lot lately, so I couldn't clean the bed out until today.  It was warm and sunny and I took the opportunity to run outside and clean up the leaves before I had to jump on another client phone call.

That's what I love about working from home. I can try to squeeze in garden chores between work. :)  Here's the garden bed with most of the leaves removed.  The cleaning took about an hour.  I am so happy with the way the strawberry plants look.   It was hard to tell how they were doing under all those leaves.  Looks like they liked being under there, the leaves did their job of keeping the plants protected under all that snow we got. They are healthy and have quadrupled in size and quantity.  The plants are a year old and used to look like this.  These plants have been sending out runners like crazy and growing really well.  I can't wait until they start producing strawberries, this will be the first year that we get any.  I can almost taste them now!