More on strawberries
Jun. 14th, 2008 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayFirst run of the day complete. Covered about half the garden, and brought in a full quart. Actually harvested more than that, but a few passing moppets took double-handfuls away with them :-)
Found my first snail of the season. Usually we get tons, so it's odd that we have so few this year. Maybe the stuff that the gardener is using to cut back on the ants is also affecting the snails.
Yesterday, I wrote, regarding weeds, "some degree of competition actually makes for bigger strawberry crops". I'd like to expand upon that a bit. During the years when I weeded ferociously in May, the strawberry plants, free of competition, lay pretty close to the ground. When there are weeds, they put more energy into stiffening their stalks, to get their leaves above the competition. My initial, naive analysis was that the bioenergy put into the stalk would be better spent making more berries, but this proved not to be the case.
You see, the number one cause of premature strawberry rot is contact with damp earth. And dew means that all the earth is at least sometimes damp. The taller and firmer the stalk of the plant, the more time the fruit spends suspended in mid-air before its weight drags it down to the ground. And the less time it spends on the ground, the more likely it is to reach full ripeness without going bad.
In the aggressively-weeded garden, it's possible that more berries were being produced -- but not more *good* berries. In those years, the minimum achievable rot:ripe ratio was more like 2:1, and it needed a huge amount of work to keep it even that low.
A small lesson in ecosystem complexity, and unforeseen consequences of intervention.
Found my first snail of the season. Usually we get tons, so it's odd that we have so few this year. Maybe the stuff that the gardener is using to cut back on the ants is also affecting the snails.
Yesterday, I wrote, regarding weeds, "some degree of competition actually makes for bigger strawberry crops". I'd like to expand upon that a bit. During the years when I weeded ferociously in May, the strawberry plants, free of competition, lay pretty close to the ground. When there are weeds, they put more energy into stiffening their stalks, to get their leaves above the competition. My initial, naive analysis was that the bioenergy put into the stalk would be better spent making more berries, but this proved not to be the case.
You see, the number one cause of premature strawberry rot is contact with damp earth. And dew means that all the earth is at least sometimes damp. The taller and firmer the stalk of the plant, the more time the fruit spends suspended in mid-air before its weight drags it down to the ground. And the less time it spends on the ground, the more likely it is to reach full ripeness without going bad.
In the aggressively-weeded garden, it's possible that more berries were being produced -- but not more *good* berries. In those years, the minimum achievable rot:ripe ratio was more like 2:1, and it needed a huge amount of work to keep it even that low.
A small lesson in ecosystem complexity, and unforeseen consequences of intervention.