About strawberries

Last weekend my husband bought twenty bails of straw, at five dollars a bale.  I like to put straw around my tomato plants to hold moisture in the ground; people tell me that also help keep blight away, but it hasn't worked for me.  I also like to put straw on strawberries for the winter.  I searched the Internet to find out when I should cover them and found out I should wait until we've had several nights of hard frosts.  

I wasn't too worried about it anyway, because my mother and grandmother never covered their strawberry plants.  I usually take the easy way out of things, because I have a lazy streak the size of Texas.

If you've ever gone to one of those places where you pick your own strawberries, you have seen the plants in nice, neat rows.  Not so in my garden, because my mom and grandma didn't have rows.  I remember one time I went to pick strawberries at my mother's house, and there was no way to get to the middle of the patch without stepping on plants.  I asked her about that and she said, "Oh, just try to step in the same places every time you pic and it will make a path through them before long."  So that's what I do.  

I googled how farmers keep strawberries in rows, and I couldn't make heads or tales out of it.  I'll just go ahead stomping out a path in my mess, like I was taught.

After cruising the Internet for berry information, I realized I was hungry for strawberries and got a package out of the freezer.  They were delicious on a scoop of vanilla ice cream.  It was a nice treat for both of us.

I've been reading a lot, now that I don't have much to do in the garden.  Right now I'm into The Warmth of Other Suns, the story of how and why millions of Black Americans left the South between 1915 and 1970 to escape the brutality of the Jim Crow Laws and find safety, better pay, and more freedom in what is known today as The Great Migration.  (Yes, I copied and pasted that sentence, because my own words seemed too awkward.)  

The stories are of real people. 

I'm glad to say that so far I've avoided my usual fall and winter depression.  I'm hoping to be able to focus on my own safe little world at home, and not worry about the terrible things happening in our world right now.  Nothing I can do would change things anyway.  I check the news on CNN.com every morning, but I don't dwell on the negative.

There really isn't much that's interesting to share these days, but I intend to do an occasional entry, just to keep things going.