Wife, Then Mama

On Wednesday I went strawberry picking with my friend Charlene. Charlene is the queen of good deals, and these strawberries cost: $0!  Yup, since the farm was getting ready to till under the second year plants, they were letting people come glean for free! (If you are in the Salem area, you should check them out.  They still had quite a few yesterday.) There were a lot of good strawberries, and even more not good ones.  That is what gleaning seems to be all about, what you lose in time (looking for the good fruits or veggies) you make up for in money (its all FREE!).  Since I have plenty of time, and not a lot of money, it seems like a great trade to me! Ideally I would use a portion of the berries to make jam.  But since I have never made jam before and don't have any pectin, I think I am just going to continue my plan of freezing them for smoothies and snacking.  I know I could easily look up how to make jam, but I would probably put it off until ...

Well if you are me, the answer is: Quite Poorly! This is my first year with a real garden.  I have tried container gardening.  Which was an epic fail due to a stand-off between my husband and I.  He didn't want to have any of our plants go to waste so he refused to let me thin them unless I wanted to transplant the ones I was removing.  So nothing really grew as big as it should have.  Or to really a very edible level. Cucumbers.  And you know, weeds... This year I have a fairly big garden, and if Michael builds the last garden box sometime this month it will get even bigger.  I mean June is pretty late for planting, but my seed packages say its okay. The big plants are sunflowers.  You know the one thing you don't really eat. But I am not really a gardener.  The only thing that seems to be growing okay is the strawberries, and we got those as plants.  Plus the slugs or some other nasty bug is eating them as soon as they ...