What's normal?

The strawberries in my balcony are certainly doing well.  More and more berries are forming and some are already very ripe and red.  I love going to the balcony to look at their growth.  The pretty white flowers bloom for a few days and then wither.  Then, in their place, tiny berries would grow.  The berries would slowly grow bigger and when they have grown big enough, they would slowly start to turn red.  I love when they are red.  They really look like jewels.  I can see them even when I'm sitting on my sofa in the living room.  So pretty.

But not all of the berries look like the normal strawberries that I would usually buy from the supermarket.  The berries in my balcony are smaller and they are all of different shapes.  Some are really tiny.  They look like they are going to grow bigger but they stay tiny, like buds, and they go from green to red.  Some are a bit bigger but they are still much much smaller than a normal berry.

I am worried about such berries.  There is one plant that has a number of such berries.  I wonder why they grow like that.  In another plant, all of the berries look normal.  And in another plant, some leaves have turned brown and the buds have not grown at all.  It's strange that I get different results from the different plants even through I gave them the same amount of water and sunlight.  This is the first time I'm growing strawberries so maybe I'm a bit anxious.

Here are the weird shapes of my strawberries...

I harvested a small batch of the ripest, reddest berries today and shared them with Pete.  The reddest ones were more likely to be sweet while the ones that were not as red were sour.  But sweet or sour, they were really nice, juicy and fresh.   We only took less than a minute to finish them.   

Sweet n sour

The strawberry looked even better this morning.  It looked like a red jewel, glistening in the sun's rays.  It tempted me to pick it right off and taste it.  But I didn't.  Well, not right away.  I watered the plants and went to the garden and a few hours later, when I went to the balcony again, I could smell that sweet strawberry scent.

So I picked it off the stem, washed it and then took a tiny bite off the tip.  A bite out of my first strawberry plant.  I was hoping it would taste as sweet as it smelled but it was sour.

Pete took the second bite.  Sour.  But as sour as it was, the fact that I could grow and pick and eat my own strawberries makes life sweet. 

Turning red

I was pulling up the blinds in the living room this morning when something red caught my eye.

One of the strawberries is ripening!  What a sight to greet me on a warm, summer morning!  Looking closely at my plants, I found another smaller berry also beginning to ripen.  The flowers have also withered so I'm looking forward to more berries.

Yay!  Although some of the plants already have some berries and flowers on when I bought them, I am glad that they are surviving.  Phew!  I hope more will ripen in June, just in time for Ina and my family's visit.

Would you like seeds with that?

Do you know they have a drive-thru to buy soil here? 

There a number of big stores selling gardening and DIY stuff here.  Not like the whimpy, tiny stores back home.  Here, they sell everything you need to build stuff - wood in many sizes and lengths, cement, fences, gates, even tools like electric saws and drills and many sizes of lawn mowers.  You can drive your car through the back and load up on the wood or any other heavy stuff, drive up to the cashier, pay and drive home.  The bags and bags of soil are neatly arranged in front of the building and there's a drive-thru for that too. 

Looking at the lines of cars that were waiting to pay for their purchases, I could see that the Swedes love to do home improvement projects.  And looking at the gardens that I pass when out on my walks, they take their gardening seriously too.

Well, today, we drove thro and bought 5 huge bags of soil that costs just SEK 99 (less than SD$20).  We also bought some pots to replant the tomato and strawberry plants.  Once we got home, I got to work immediately.  I put one tomato plant into each big pot since they would grow bigger.  The strawberries I could plant together in one long planter.  I could only fit 4 small plants into the planter.  I guess the rest would be planted outdoors in the garden.

the strawberries

how the balcony is looking now

We can't go to the garden today since it's been drizzling the whole afternoon.  We also have  to buy wood for the raised beds.  Since we don't have the wood and since the weather is not co-operating, we have to stay indoors instead.  Time for TV.