Strawberry Fields and Hometown Visits

Do you love strawberries?


I do.  In fact, it’s my favorite type of fruit.

One of my earliest memories is of the strawberry patch growing in my grandfather’s garden in Frankfurt, Germany.

We would visit them once a year for a month when we were young while they lived there. I remember pesky rabbits trying to steal some of the sweet strawberries and my grandfather’s ongoing battle to keep them out.

My hometown, in Southern California, was surrounded by strawberry fields. When you drive down the 101 Highway through Ventura County, you could smell their delicious fragrance.

What’s even better than smelling the strawberries, is being able to stop by the small produce markets right next to the fields where you can buy large flats of strawberries straight from the field.

The strawberries are beautiful, unblemished and you can’t resist sampling one or two or even three before you make it back into your car.

While I love living in Arizona, I do miss the strawberry fields from my hometown. However, now my second-oldest daughter, Rachele, lives close to the town where I grew up and so I get to visit the fields again and bring home huge flats of delicious, sweet strawberries.

In fact, earlier this week, I stopped by this small produce store and bought some strawberries and took them home and made 20 jars of strawberry jam. I stayed up late last night, finishing up canning the strawberries and had some homemade strawberry jam on my toast this morning – yum!

So, why was I in California?

Well, I had a very important reason – my grandson, made his debut!

Of course, my husband and I were prepared to leave at any minute to drive out to California so that we could be there for our daughter when she went into labor, but the entire process didn’t go exactly as we had planned.

In fact, I ended up spending 8 days in California.

I’ll share more of our journey next time – it may be a two-parter 🙂

Summer Adventures: Pick Your Own Strawberries and Cherries

Noelle Johnson, aka, 'AZ Plant Lady' is a author, horticulturist, and landscape consultant who helps people learn how to create, grow, and maintain beautiful desert gardens that thrive in a hot, dry climate. She does this through her consulting services, her online class Desert Gardening 101, and her monthly membership club, Through the Garden Gate. As she likes to tell desert-dwellers, "Gardening in the desert isn't hard, but it is different."