The Price of Fresh Strawberries

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God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.

- Abraham Cowley

Everybody hates slugs. Locally, a neighbor surrounds his entire garden with sections of plastic gutter, along the bottom of which he pours an inch-thick river of rock salt. Another sprinkles ground or grated ginger around her beds. Slugs hate ginger even more than they love strawberries. But ginger, garlic, and salt all wash away in the rain. The copper pipe idea seems the most workable, and that's the one I used this year. No invaders yet, and joy looks at me admiringly these days.

Joy's favorite mulch for strawberries, which prefer slightly acidic soil, is pine needles. They also like lots of organic material, best when applied to the soil the previous fall so it can rot, but good anytime in the spring. ( We all know what kind of nitrogen-rich organic material we're talking about here, right? Look under "horse:" This is the reason you should wash your strawberries after harvest, and no true gardener ever forgets. Our daughter has a pony, and we keep chickens; chicken and horse manure are the gold and silver standard of strawberry gardening. Seen from a certain perspective, it's beautiful stuff.)

Don't give up now. Fresh strawberries, remember? And quite apart from the daily fresh air and exercise, you will find that eating strawberries promotes good health—not usually true of the good things in life, such as coffee, beer, and chocolate. Like raspberries and blueberries, strawberries contain ellagic acid, which medical studies show inhibits cancers caused by environmental toxins, such as the preservatives and pesticides in coffee, beer, and chocolate.

Like figs, grapes, melons, and a few others, strawberries will get no sweeter after picking. If you want to know why, you'll need to learn the word "climacteric," referring to those fruits that do get sweeter after picking. Strawberries are, obviously, nonclimacteric, a fact you can use around other gardeners to astound them with your berry wisdom and celerity at Scrabble.

In climates like western Oregon, strawberry plants seldom need protection from cold, but in colder areas, it won't hurt to put several inches of loose straw around them. Cover the beds during the night with plastic, if you like, and rip it off again first thing in the morning, because slugs love any warm areas next to strawberry plants. If you find one, remember that dawn is traditional for executions. Keep saying, "Live, strawberries/ Die, slugs" to yourself, or you might lose heart after all this work and murder.

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