Strawberry Fields Forever

The other day I sat down in the strawberry patch, in the stealth fruit tent, and picked 4 lbs of strawberries without having to stretch. The day was sunny so I was working in a sweet, heady strawberry-scented cloud.

What can one do with that many strawberries? Well, we weren't geared up for jam making but we used the newly bought ice-cream making machine (A dangerous purchase, who would have thought the health conscious under gardener would do such a thing?) and churned up a bucket of strawberry ice cream along with a pail of sorbet, while the rest became Cossack strawberries, bathed in vodka as cold as the steppes in January and sprinkled with some sugar.

And the next day, another lb or so of strawberries were collected, more sorbet mixed up and more eating of the strawbs. The whole house is beginning to smell of strawberries.

And it's a sugary, heady combination, so unlike the artificially manufactured strawberry flavourings. One lad at work says he doesn't like real strawberries as he prefers the chemical strawberry taste. You know when you eat strawberry ice cream that it's not quite right, the taste is sweet but not rich enough and redolent enough, the colour a little too glaringly pink, like someone overcompensating and becoming excruciating.

It's an eye opener when you see home made strawberry ice cream, it's a pale delicate pink, more of a misty pinkness, possibly the colour of angel ears, while the taste is complex but understated in a very modest way.

Eat your heart out super, mega, world global mega-brands, pedalling your cloying, saturated dreams of your food scientists.

My strawberries can barely travel more than 2 miles and will only last a few hours after that, hence the sorbet and ice-cream rushes. But the ice cream hawkers have to have industrial strength strawbs, and the resulting concotions ahve to be bolstered by their chemicals.

But then again when you have people who prefer the taste of chemicals and the many more who have never made their own ice cream, then maybe the food giants have inherited the earth.

The next glut to look forward to is blackberries. I pick these wild across south London, yes wild in London, there are many secret places where there are jungles of brambles.

Can A Snail Eat a Large Strawberry

I'd noticed quite a large strawberry reddening in the frame the other morning, and thought "Aye, aye, I'll have that tomorrow." Tomorrow dawned, wandered down to the frame and there was just a stalk, no strawberry, gone, picked clean by something. Now I found a snail in the pot, and he was dispatched to the great snail heap in the sky, but can it have slurped down a whole, large strawberry?

Then I thought, maybe, it was a mouse, or a rat?

Traps, I think.

The words of Genghis Khan sprang to mind, he wasn't a great gardener, but this is certainly good advice,

“The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters.”

Well maybe I won't gather into my bosom the daughters and wives of the snails, mice and rats but I'm certainly going to scatter them.

Those strawberries are mine I say, mine.