First Strawberry, out on the deck, July 28th, 2007, Minneapolis, Minnesota, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Liz and I like to plant our perennials in pots on the deck, then transplant them later into the gardens. It gives us the advantage of enjoying a summer full of thriving foliage, bursting blooms, and wispy green stems close to our living space. I am loving gardening like never before. It’s an endless source of pleasure and ground for me.
It’s also something we do together that makes the humid Minnesota summers bearable (I’m a winter girl all the way). To me, it is gardening, motorcycling, and geocaching that make summer fun. This year, the thing I’ve done the most is gardening and yard work.
I discovered the first strawberry yesterday in the pots at the top of the stairs. When I photographed it, I noticed the naked white that will soon turn to crimson.
Saturday, July 28th, 2007
Beautiful baby berry… let us know how it turns out!
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Can’t wait! I’m looking forward to tasting!
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I like the contrast of age in this picture…the deck boards that were once painted blue, now worn back to original wood…the terra cotta pot that has the white residue that forms after a few years of love, and the brand-new strawberry…clear and alive and fresh to the world. It all looks homey. And inviting. And part of a slow, rich life.
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Sinclair, I like that you pointed out the age vs alive and fresh. It’s something I wasn’t consciously awake to. But maybe that is something I love about gardening – the moments when a cactus bloom or a strawberry make their brief appearance into the world, then disappear.
Are you doing any gardening this year? I love to hear people’s gardening stories. It’s also something I remember with fondness about my mother.
She was always outside, pruning the magnolia or planting pansies around the front walk. When I went back to Georgia this time and saw one of the houses I grew up in, I was amazed at how the trees and plants had grown. Same way in Pennsylvania: a 4 foot maple in the front yard is now a giant.
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I’m a part of a 5-person community garden this year. Two of the people who participate (a couple) are over-the-top gardeners…the rest of us don’t know quite what to do. They are both artists, and have built several fantastic structures for the tomatoes, beans, and peas. They are rabbit-and-squirrel-foiling apparatuses. Though clever, I guess I didn’t mind sharing a little food with wildlife. I look forward to having my own vegetable garden someday. One beyond the prying eyes of neighbors, one I don’t have to share, one where there is no competition.
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Lovely shot, QM. We got a bag of peaches this morning from the guy at Growers Market who gave me the plums when you went with me.
Sinclair – interesting that a community garden would have that competitive element to it. That just ain’t right, as far as I’m concerned. But I suppose it’s everywhere.
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Sinclair, sorry to hear the community garden is competitive. Too much of that in the world already. Kind of defeats the purpose of adding the term community.
We don’t have any vegetables this year. The only edibles we planted are oregano and strawberries. Liz likes tomatoes but there are always so many at the end of the year, we don’t know what to do with them!
Unless you can at the end of summer, what do you end up doing with all those vegetables?
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ybonesy, I remember that guy at the Growers Market. Here in Minnesota, we call them the Farmers Market.
Liz and I haven’t been to the Farmers Market this year. Maybe we are about due. I love to buy flowers there. And it’s fun to feel the organic energy!
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I’m going to look up geocaching. Never heard of it.
I admire gardeners, or even people who putz around in the yard. In Georgia the summers are like living inside a moist pizza oven. There’s little escape from the heat. I spend my days swimming, just to feel something cool on my skin.
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mariacristina, Geocaching runs on similar technology to blogging. It’s a kind of adult hide-and-seek that uses Global Positioning Systems to provide hours of physical activity and fun for family and friends alike. You seek the caches with a GPSr, then go out and find them using that same device. It gets Liz and I out of the house and is great fun. My brother turned me on to it. I think he’s well up over 1000 caches now.
Here’s the Geocaching website link (link).
I didn’t know you were in Georgia! I was just there with my mother in June to research my book. It was hot then, and humid, but I’m sure it’s even hotter now. It gets humid in Minnesota, too, but my step-dad calls it a dry humidity. I think he’s right. It’s much hotter Down South!
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[…] Solstice, holds the light in the palm of her hand. June is the month of bleeding hearts, peonies, strawberries and tea […]
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Here’s another First Strawberry from 2007. The berries this year are much plumper and juicier than the one in this photo! We also planted some vegetables this year (whereas it looks like we didn’t in 2007).
This year: kale, Mr. Stripey Tomato, hearty Northern peanuts, lettuce, broccoli, and a beautiful pot of peppers. Also some basil. Temps have dropped to 83 at 10:30pm. I was melting in the studio earlier today. Had two fans going. 8)
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