I like plants that you can rely on. Garlic was one of my first true loves in gardening because of its regularity. You plant it in fall; it sprouts in spring; you top it in May or June and pull it and dry it two weeks after that. 

I have been told about other plants with which other people feel equally comfortable—but have given me some degree of difficulty. Perhaps it’s due to self-introduced complications.

Once you get a method for growing something and you know using that method will get the plant to continue to produce for you, there is a deep satisfaction in putting in the time up front to grow those plants.

This year, I’m going to be optimistic and hopefully add our strawberries to my short list of successes. Last spring we invested in a hundred or so strawberry plants of two varieties and got them started in our greenhouse. 

Throughout the following weeks, they took rather well to the soil and became fairly hearty, even producing a few quarts of berries for us in that first year. I learned about problems I never had before because I never got them to grow strawberries well previously, so I did my research during the winter. The plants wintered over wonderfully in the greenhouse with little to no help from us, and after a simple weeding and cleaning up around them this spring, they have bushed up twice as big as they ever got last year. 

I was surprised as I opened the greenhouse door this past week to see flowers on most of them already, with large green bases that were to produce fruit even in mid-April. I was not surprised to see new plants establishing themselves in our walkways and exposed soil all around the tarped beds. This is not so much a problem as it is an opportunity, because although these new plants aren’t where I want them, I can dig them up and fill in the rest of the bed rather than buying new plants. What’s more, I’ll be saving a handful for my grandfather’s garden too. I’ll likely suggest he plant them under his own greenhouse cover.

If the strawberries continue to grow as I suspect they will, we will soon be well stocked with fruit and my mornings will begin with a thoroughly sweet inspection of the greenhouse before I begin the rest of my work. Not a bad way to start the day. 

I’ll have to keep an eye out for my youngins, as we’re looking to move into our new house soon—it sits not far from the greenhouse. You’ve heard of a fox in the henhouse, but I’ll raise you a five-year-old in the berry patch. That’s OK though—better they like good food than the sugar and nonsense from the store. 

My dad had a disciplined method of picking berries he once explained to me. One for the mouth, one for the bucket. You would alternate 50/50 until you were full. Oddly enough, he still ended up with nearly nothing in the bucket anyway. Strange how that happens. 

The way out here we figure it out one plant at a time, and by the time we retire we have a handful of things we can teach to our grandchildren, getting them ahead of the learning curve. I might be able to instill in them something more important than an abundant berry patch by the time I’m old and tired—a natural understanding of how to grow a few things. But I’ll bet they enjoy those berries just as much, if not more, than the know-how.