In our garden, strawberries were planted in late May and I am waiting for them to become strong enough to allow the plants to flower and set fruit. I planted everbearing/day neutral varieties (San Andreas and Mara des Bois) and they will fruit during planting year, no need to wait a year as you would with June-bearing.
In the meantime, Larriland Farm, which is my go-to for pick your own anything, had strawberries available for picking. My son and I picked 10.5 pounds in very hot temperatures in about 45 minutes. I cannot imagine doing that as my job. We came home to make strawberry sorbet, frozen yogurt, strawberry cream cake (the frosting on this cake is FANTASTIC, highly recommend it) and strawberry liqueur.
DIY strawberry liqueur:
To get the berries ready for use, I washed them and then set them outside on a grid to dry. It was VERY windy and that helped dry them within minutes.
To have strawberries for future smoothies, I laid some out on wax paper on the cookie sheets, and set the sheets in the freezer. This results in individually frozen berries that can be poured into a freezer bag and stored in the freezer. I can then just pull out how ever many berries I want at a time without having to defrost a whole bag. If you dump all the berries in a bag and THEN freeze, you just get a large mass of frozen berries that is not easy or convenient to use.
Blueberries and raspberries are starting to ripen in our garden…stay tuned.
