Strawberries

We harvested our first strawberries today, which because of the cool spring is a bit later than previous years. Two years ago we were picking them the first week of June and last year they were ripe in late May. The plants are loaded with blossoms, so it should be a plentiful harvest.

We decided to add more strawberries, so I dug up most of the creeping phlox which bordered two sides of our patio, but had become overrun with grass. We transplanted another 12 plants, which hopefully will start bearing next spring. I've been pinching off the flowers to allow the plants to concentrate their energy on developing the root system. Eventually this new plot will take over from the original plants as their productivity declines.

Cutworm

One of the more disheartening things a gardener can see when visiting the garden in the morning is the sight of a newly transplanted seedling laying prone on ground, as if it had been felled by some tiny lumberjack. This is the work of the cutworm, a small worm which chews through the stem of young seedlings at night. I've had cutworms eat both tomato and pepper plants in the past. When you find cutworm damage like this, you can often find the offender itself, curled up just under the soil level near the stem.

One of the recommended defenses against cutworms is to fashion some sort of collar around the stem, extending and inch above and below the soil level. Another is to wrap aluminum foil around the stem, which I've done to the rest of my tomato and pepper seedlings. If you start your own seedlings, it's a good idea to plant more than you need so that you'll have some in reserve to replace those that meet a fate like the one above.

End of season

We bottled our fifth and final batch of the "beer season" this past weekend. Most beers ferment best at temperatures below 72 degrees, so it works good for us to stop brewing when the weather is getting warmer and the garden season is kicking into gear. The picture above shows me siphoning the beer from the carboy, where it had been fermenting the last four weeks, into the bottling bucket.

This was our first winter of beer brewing, and we ended up with 237 bottles of beer. The styles we bottled were a porter, brown ale, Oktoberfest, Scottish ale, and extra pale ale. We've learned a lot about brewing and beer styles of the last six months and plan to continue this fall. Until then, we have a good supply to enjoy and give away to others.