I don’t normally like to share bad news on here—there’s always plenty of news to share, and I try to focus on celebrating the successes instead. But I know a lot of people look forward to our strawberries—we’ve had people asking for them already—so here goes. Over the winter, we lost the majority of our strawberry plants to voles. The plants looked great last fall, but when we uncovered them this spring, entire rows were missing, with vole tunnels cruising right down the middle of the beds and every single plant eaten. There are still some plants left, but it’s a pretty massive loss.
On top of that, we got hit by a frost in the middle of May that damaged many of the remaining flowers.
All this to say, we won’t have much of a strawberry harvest this spring. I’m still planning to pick every last berry (the first few are nearly ripe!) but there’s just not much out there. The good news is that most other farms probably weren’t affected by these issues—this is by no means a regional crop failure, so there should still be plenty of local strawberries to get your fix! But I feel like I should apologize up front—we just aren’t going to have many this year.