Cocoa and here new baby!

Katrina had a dream the night before that she was out of the house and that I called here to tell here that Coca was having here baby.  And then it happened!

                                         

This little one will have a name very soon.

Companion planting herbs article

I tend to pick up the current issue of Herb Quarterly if it looks to have an interesting article or two most seasons.  Tractor Supply usually has it, although I could not find the summer 2017 issue in any of the usual places last year ... I probably ought to subscribe.  I'll get round-to-it.

This season's issue caught my eye the other day last week, and then I got really excited: an article on companion planting with the focus on herbs!  I have Louise Riotte's books Carrots Love Tomatoes and Roses Love Garlic (both in one hardback volume), along with Tammy Hartung's Homegrown Herbs and Miranda Smith's Your Backyard Herb Garden, which have some notes on companion planting as well.  Just starting with the HQ article and a stack of 4x6 index cards, I can tell this will be more of a series of posts than just one long post, so I thought to post up my sources in case anyone wants to get these and follow along.  David the Good over at theSurvivalGardener.com has expressed an interest in my notes on the topic.  Right now I am thinking to divide the herbs into common versus uncommon and annual versus perennial, so it's looking like there will be four posts all told.

Strawberry time

Plant City, Florida strawberries are in season right now, and I came home from errands yesterday with a flat of them.  These are picked ripe, so you don't want to wait more than 24 hours to get them taken care of, whether that's jamming them or eating them.

hulling and cutting up strawberries

a little over half done

that's only 4-1/2 pounds in the smidge-over-2 gallon pot

weighing the strawberries out, one pound at a time

I am curious to see how much I get out of a full flat, as last year I ran short of jam jars and only did 2/3 of the flat ... by the time I had more jars, the strawberries were past the using stage (as in, a fuzzy mush).  So here we go:
9 pounds of strawberries per flat, $10 a flat
15 cups sugar, about 6 pounds
3/4 cup (actually, 7 ounces) lemon juice
3 cups water
No, Mom, I am still not using pectin ... just haven't seen it on sale.  No big deal.  Now it's time for the fun part: boiling it down to gel stage.  I ended up pulling my 22-quart (yes, 5-1/2 gallon!) stockpot so I don't have to worry about it boiling over.

Hubby is out bottle feeding the orphan kids right now - he fully supports me doing up a year's worth of strawberry jam.