Strawberry Wine, Part III

In our days of rainy picking we had filled a few bowls.

Over the years we have accumulated a stash of stainless-steel containers, mostly bowls, which come in for regular service during the summer. At the beginning of this week we were at the point, in fact, of having bowls of strawberries, fully ripe, on two refrigerator shelves, while other bowls of ripe or ripening berries were taking up space on kitchen table and kitchen window ledge ... prompting Martha to make noises about running out of bowls for gathering greens from the garden and for making the evening salad.

So late Monday I was preparing the five-gallon crock and measuring out ingredients based on a wine we liked from last year's efforts of around this time.

Enlarging the recipe called for enough strawberries to half-fill the rock, before their being chopped and mashed down. I washed and emptied large bowl after large bowl of berries -- not quite depleting our stores, but completely using all but the ones still ripening.

Twelve and a half pounds ...

It astonishes me still -- having such a quantity of such fleeting delicacies ... mashed up and given over to the labors of yeasts.

Cheers ...

Picking in the Rain

A rainy June leads to your having many moments of being down with knees to the damp ground, leaning forward among wet leaves and reaching for ripening berries. Mornings -- the strawberries beneath the row of grapes where the plants grow rampant. Evenings -- same areas again, and then in the fenced-in, protected strawberry beds. So you are getting wet first thing and then again last thing, the way these days have been going.

Yesterday, I opted to leave the house a little early, to walk up the hill and do some Maple Valley work. I left all the picking for the later gray hours of the day. At work we watched the clouds and the rains through large windows. When late afternoon arrived and the three of us -- Martha, Lorna and me -- were home from the job, as we were settling down to enjoy a revivifying nip of whisky, the sun started peering and then staring out from between clouds.

"Picking strawberries in the sun ... why, that is not how it is done," I joked. The irony of the evening, when the sky-change might have made the picking of berries more an idle pleasure and less a sodden task, is that I never got around to picking. We were looking into ideas and possibilities for this and that -- mostly writing-related travel later in the year -- so that suddenly I noticed we had reached the point in the evening when, even with a clear sky above, things were too dim for seeking reddening glimpses among the greenery.

Cheers ...

The Weight of Strawberries

Tuesday in the rainy morning I spent an hour bent among the strawberry plants, picking. I was especially concerned about gathering the still-white ones showing their first touch of blush, from among the plants growing below the Kay Gray and Canadice grapes.

These plants among the grape vines I had meant to weed out. Since I have yet to get to that task, though, I have been taking what fruit I can before the robins eat it all. Last year from these plants we harvested almost nothing: the birds were voracious. This year by picking at first hint of ripening, we are adding to our strawberry stores.

After picking below those grape vines, I picked in the areas that are fenced and netted -- and then walked up the hill to Organic Maple Co-op, the place where I am putting in some days of work. In the course of moving some 400-pound barrels of syrup that day I threw my back out, a little -- enough for a few days of discomfort. The fault, of course, lies with the strawberries. I was bent over in the rainy chill for an hour -- then went and exerted myself. Were only strawberries a more respectable weight -- say, five or ten pounds apiece -- then even in the rainy chill I would have limbered myself up for other tasks of the day. I would have been sweating, wheelbarrowing the strawberry harvest up from the gardens to the basement chutes where I would dump the morning tonnage.

Instead, what are strawberries? Tiny bits of soft and seedy ripeness that at their largest will fit in multiples within the open palm of the hand, weighing probably less than the heads of the robins we would like to decapitate for their marauding incursions. Strawberries as fruit are tiny, low to the ground, leaf-hidden, and connected to their parent plants by whiskery bits of green thinness.

No wonder they break backs.

Cheers ...