The nearby U-Pick farm has strawberries available. We've been out of strawberry jam for 5 months, and the natives are restless. (Oooooh, the abuse they endure, with the only jelly in the house being home-made grape that is completely awesome! My family is SO mistreated. My heart is bleeding for them.) We've been waiting for June, waiting for cheap strawberries instead of making the jam from frozen berries purchased at the store.
When I was trying to find out the cost of the berries, there were no prices listed on the farm's website. No prices listed on their signs by the road. But the website mentioned that they were "agritainment" for the whole family. There's a playground. There are animals. There are hay rides. There will be a corn maze. This made me nervous. This sounded pricey.
So today I wash the jelly jars. I gather the
slave labor children and the buckets, and we head off to the farm. And I find U-Pick berries priced at $1.35/pound and the already-picked at $3.75/pound. YIKES. The regular price at Woodmans for frozen berries is $1.89/pound ... and you don't have to pick 'em in the hot sun. Or wash them and hull them. The price for frozen berries last time I was at Woodmans was only $1/pound.
I'm sorry, but I don't want to pay extra for buying local. Not when "local" means paying the premium for the farmy
experience.
More incentive to get my own berries in the ground prior to next May!
I put in ONE strawberry plant this year, which I intend to coddle and nurse and pamper into a full patch. Every healthy chunk of new growth will get staked out to root.
ReplyDeleteIt's kind of like a drawn-and-quartered strawberry plant!
Wow...that is pricey! When you just want some berries it would be nice if you didn't have to pay for the payground, etc.
ReplyDeleteI bought the most delicious strawberries at Kroger today for .99! They are ending a sale of 1.99, and they were getting some spots...but they are perfect for whey smoothies and for making into jam! It makes me just crazy that strawberry farms or pumpkin farms cannot just sell their goods instead of robbing everyone with their playground and fish ponds!
ReplyDeleteWe did plant strawberries this year. We found some BEAUTIFUL plants. We planted 8 of them. Well, the bunny that has been destroying our flowers and basil decided that he loved those plants and ate every last piece of them. If we ever catch that bunny, we need to cook it! It HAS to have the most wonderful basil flavor to him with all the basil he ate that I HAD grown! Boo Hoo!
Kristi, I was reading in Backwoods Home Magz recently. It mentioned marigolds to deter bunnies and deer. I'd heard this before but found it unlikely to work as well as purported. But apparently it's not the smell of the marigolds that keeps them away. It's that the marigolds have such a strong smell that the critters don't even smell the tomatoes and herbs and corn and stuff. I'm thinking that's why marigolds never worked well for me: I planted seeds (instead of transplanting grown plants) and the stinky flowers weren't camouflaging my veggies and fruits. I also was pretty sparse with the marigolds in the years that I did plant grown marigolds. We didn't have too much problem with rabbits before, but around here they are mega-abundant. My huntress isn't going to keep Thumper under control and I'm going to have to resort to something else when we get the garden going next year.
ReplyDeleteOh, Kristi, another thing I heard was to use human hair. If you give haircuts at home, sweep up the hair and sprinkle it under and around plants. It seemed that tying a thin shaft of long hair around a tomato stem was a better deterrent than marigolds.
Susan,
ReplyDeleteI've used both of those things with no luck. The bunnies at the marigolds and I'm not sure what they thought of the hair but it didn't scare them. I have used blood meal with some success. I sprinkle about a cup per 5 sq. feet and then water. It stinks but it seems to work. Perhaps, though, they've had their fill of the tender stuff by the time I get around to noticing they've eaten my veggies and flowers!