The Strawberry Plot or are they Weeds?

My strawberry plot began simply enough.

I saw a six-pack end-of-the-year container of bedraggled, half-dead-looking plants.

We had a blank spot in our gray water garden that wasn’t doing anything that fall.

I bought them for $2 and took them home.

Several days later, I remembered to plant them in the dry, empty, and not very good soil patch.

From experience, I knew strawberries were hardy weeds.

I figured that if they survived, they would survive. I wasn’t going to demand or expect much.

This is what happened.

Am I playing games with the words strawberry and plot?

Of course.

This was not my first time dealing with berry plants.

Just ask my kids.

Gardening in general began in Connecticut when my older children were toddlers.

I grew up in a Los Angeles suburb, where we rarely even weeded the lawn. Plants were on their own.

All the thumbs were worn from turning pages at our house, not planting things!

Things changed when I had kids of my own.

Mom, is this a strawberry plot?

“You mean plant,” I said.

He was three.

I wasn’t sure.

It was then that I realized I needed my friend Liz to tell me what was growing in our yard.

I had no clue.

Well, maybe that was a tomato bush?

She laughed when she arrived. I had a pad of paper to take notes.

“Those are wild strawberries,” she told my son. “You can tell by how small they are.”

The current strawberry plot started from a tired six-pack.

He promptly ate them.

Which is what he did with everything safe and edible that Liz pointed out!

How hard could it be to grow strawberries?

Not hard at all.

We planted them in Washington in one cleared-off spot in the grass. They went wild.

The children and the wild deer ate them right from the bush.

Things slowed down in Hawai’i.

We couldn’t grow tomatoes or strawberries in the islands 30 years ago.

We did grow a pineapple,

But only one.

Are they weeds?

They are in our mainland strawberry plot.

I cull them, give them away, and invite folks to take plants.

I took a barrel-full to my son’s house last year.

His first-grader wants me to bring more to grow his strawberry plot!

Strawberries love the gray water garden–and have taken over half of it.

This year, for the first time, I applied fertilizer in the spring.

We now have good-sized strawberries.

And everyone is happy.

Try it. Really.

Strawberries grow easily in North America.

And they always make great jam.

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