A Little Harvest Today

The first real harvests of any size were realized today.
The weather was clear and sunny with a coolish breeze--just perfect for weeding and harvesting. The nets could be rolled-back to a great degree and that made checking and picking very easy. Of course the most difficult thing of all was not eating the harvest. Wink

I could hear my partner peeping with delight as she found another "Big Red". At one point I had to ask if her method was--"One for the trug...one for me, one for the trug...one for me". I kept my own "sampling" quiet, working with all the discreet stealth of a cut worm. (whispering--they WERE delicious).

As some of you may know, we decided to renew our strawbs with some "new blood" last year--that is to say, we bought some new plants after researching at length.
The types that we decided upon were the 'Corona', the 'Polka' and the 'Lambada'.
The Lambadas were the weakest and did the worst, not producing a flower as of yet. The most succumbed to the harsh winter.
We did a taste taste of the remaining Corona and Polka. We included a third 'taster'- our neighbour at the new lottie. We all three agreed (independently) that the Corona was sweeter and that the Polks was a bit strionger in flavour. Tartness was a factor in it's flavour.
So the Coronas will be the ones that we use when eating whipped cream and cake and the Polka will be mixed with the Coronas for making Jam.

Here you see the first, modest harvest of new and old plots...

As I was taking pics, my partner tweeted fron across the way, "No, no don't take the pics yet, I have something to go with them...and came running up to me out of breath.

She had weedled a hand full of Rhubarb out of our neighbour taster. The rhubarb was used to mix with the strawbs when making jam. It adds natural pectin for setting-up and one doesn't notice it when eating the jam. You don't need to use much.

Here are just a couple of close-ups of the beauties

And some in her hand to show size of some of them.

There were six jars of jam produced from that trug of strawbs.

Here you can see some of the small peas. We got enough for two meals for ourselves and one meal for the m-i-l.

I can still almost taste those strawbs and peas that we had for supper. Razz

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....

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Sjoerd http://www.volkstuindersvereniginghoornenomstreken.nl/Page11.html