Berry Goodness and Betty MacDonald

It's berry season, and nothing smells more deliciously sweet than a pot of crushed strawberries cooking on the stove for jam. Most people here head out to Graysmarsh Farm in Sequim for u-pick, but Tim's niece Deanna discovered a place out in Chimacum last year that has u-pick strawberries, so we went there yesterday and got about 4-5 gallons between us.

This farm is called Egg & I Gardens, located at 2027 Egg and I Road. Coming from Port Townsend, drive north down Center Road, turn left on Egg and I, and go another mile or so until you see the sign on the left. The owners, Doyle and Stephanie Yancey (no relation to the local musician named Gordy, but he gets that all the time, he said), planted the strawberries as ground cover and erosion control for a bank awhile back and got such good yield they decided to offer u-pick. At $5 a gallon (they have black plastic pots there for measuring) or $1.75 a pound, it's a much better deal than anything you'll buy in the store, and it doesn't take very long at all to pick a bunch. Bring the kids to help if you want, but the odds are stacked heavily against all of the berries making it into the bucket as you can see here by the evidence on Deanna's (and her partner Hans') son's face and clothes.

Read and Seed

I'm pretty sure there are more gardening books than dandelions out there, not that the abundance of either is a bad thing. I say this because once a week I do a volunteer shift checking in library materials, and I always come home with a pile of books about growing food, to read or skim. Just when I think I've seen them all, I find another I've never heard of that intrigues me.

Of all of the reference material for growers that you could spend your time on, there are two books I think are "must haves" for the Olympic Peninsula gardener's personal library shelf.