Picking strawberries in the garden

Strawberry on plant

In the past couple years we have grown strawberries the story has been my oldest daughter salivating over the strawberries asking, “Is it red enough yet?”

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This year her desire for strawberries is just as great though with the plant maturing as well as the additional plant we propagated last year she has been easily getting her fill with plenty more ripe strawberries on the plants.  Not wanted to be wasteful, we went out and picked all of the ripe strawberries.

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Not having enough to make something like jam or even some strawberry shortcake for the family we opted to make a strawberry milkshake.

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Strawberry milkshake recipe

  • handful of strawberries
  • 2 scoops of ice cream
  • milk

Directions: Add strawberries and ice cream to blender.  Blend adding milk until it has the consistency of…well…a milkshake.

Guest post: Huge strawberry

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I have been pretty busy lately and was happy and honored that Megan from Megan’s Garden would do a guest post about a strawberry she found.

It was a crazy day I found a strawberry, a double strawberry . I am not kidding. A strawberry is not like this. I ate it. It was yummy. Find one in your strawberry box. I want one again.Their hard to find.

Updated time-lapse video of strawberries growing in growbox


Here is the strawberries growing after 2 weeks in the grow box. Looks like I may need to get some Q-tips out and do some manual pollination if I want to see berries. I feel so dirty…

Why you should check on your grow box (especially if it is computerized)

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My day job is in software development, so of course it came to mind that software/hardware can fail while I was making my computerized grow box.  During its inception, I would check on it daily physically or remotely to make sure all was well.  After a couple weeks of this it was so stable that I started to not check quite as often.  Though in my mind there was never any question of if it would crash, it was when. Well that answer came tonight when I decided to check on my strawberries, cucumbers, and blueberry plant (trying to propagate a blueberry plant damaged in recent snow storm)

I noticed the lights were out and turned on the LCD display to see “Unable to find operating system.”  Before anyone screams “you should have used Linux”, the problem was completely hardware related caused by a failed hard drive (not even the one with the operating system).  Unfortunately this was the drive that had the SQL database, so hopefully I will be able to savage some of the data.  Once I got the machine to boot up I saw the temperature was down to 38 degrees (poor little cucumber plants) but fortunately in the time it took to write this post it warmed up to 47.3F 57.7F, so hopefully the cucumbers will feel better in the morning.

Tonight I am adding one more item to my software to do list, a Vista Gadget to monitor the health of the grow box to ensure it is up and running.  This was also a good time to ask the mental question, “When was the last time I backed up my code?”  Code now backed up and am wondering why I am breaking my cardinal rule of always having source control even with a single developer.

A little help in the computerized grow box

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My wife was the first to identify the little helper and today I was able to capture him on camera.  Looks like it is more than just the breeze helping pollinate those strawberries in the automated computerized grow box.  Yet another benefit of having my grow box in my garage.

Fall Strawberries

I really like the color of these strawberries I propagated last this summer. I still have to figure out what I am actually going to do with these.

IKE