The stump & the wild strawberry: Tuesday it was my difficult duty to explain to a great-granddaughter that wild strawberries look good, but don’t taste good. Later this year, or maybe next, I may have to address her definite suspicion that not long after Thanksgiving, her grandpa turns into Santa Claus . . . .
A clover, one of my spring favorites, and the bees’ staunch ally. But where are the bees?
Don’t know what these are, on a bush; but there’s lots of them just now. . . .
We have a cactus patch In The Yard. Its annual blossoms are exquisite, but won’t be out for a few weeks yet (this one is from a couple years back.) It started when a lady up the street let me rip a rounded chunk off her plant. That didn’t hurt the cactus; but she warned me to wear gloves & be careful, because it had lots of invisible sharp stickers. I skipped the gloves, grabbed a smooth-looking patch, and only got a half-dozen of the unseen hard-to-remove stickers in my palm. In The Yard I shoved one edge of it into the dirt, and forgot about it. Now it rules a growing fiefdom. My granddaughter wanted to take a chunk home to her yard. I said sure, but be careful, etc. Being related to me, she naturally skipped the gloves too, grabbed a smooth patch, and only got a few stickers.
There she is in the middle, expertly herding her two cats, err, kittens. In the purple plastic bucket she’s carrying, a rounded cactus chunk is heading for a new home. It’s still a prickly world . . . .
Wild strawberries that don’t taste good are called false wild strawberries. There are ones that do taste good, very good, better than tame strawberries, but they grow up north. I know where several patches used to be in western NY, no idea if they are still there or have fallen prey to developments. They were at the corners of neglected farm fields.
The mock or false strawberry has a bumpy surface with seed protrusions. It also has yellow flowers while real wild strawberries have white flowers.