Wild Strawberries

I’ve spent time several evenings after work the last two weeks picking wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana). Wild strawberries are a bit tricky. Though many plants will flower, not all plants will have berries. And they are so small that you need to find a concentration of plants with berries to make it worth your while to pick them.

My dad introduced me to wild strawberry picking. He picked these berries as a kid and my grandma would make jam from them. I don’t know why someone would want to ruin fresh delicious berries by making jam out of them.

Wild strawberries seem to like open areas with sandy, gravelly, well drained soils. Bluffs, open mossy gravel bars that are not overgrown and shaded with trees and old pastures with poorer soils and short grass that haven’t been ploughed or grazed heavily for many years are good spots to find them. Probably the best areas that I have found are the sand and gravel of open roadsides that aren’t heavily used and old pastures. One has to be careful that roadsides are not sprayed before picking berries but usually they won’t be if they are not heavily used.

Patches of wild strawberries may persist for years with the next year’s plants establishing by runners but eventually they play out just like domestic berries. This is usually reset by a disturbance of some kind, floods making new gravel bars, ploughing, fires, and of course new layers of gravel and sand.

The flavor of these small berries is intense. It is hard to describe but the closest I can come up with is that they have a very nice perfume, which may be where the genus name Fragaria comes from. In my opinion, these berries are better than even best domestic berries and I like domestic strawberries. I read somewhere that many domestic varieties of strawberries are descended from these wild strawberries and coastal strawberries (Fragaria chiloensis) which do not, to my knowledge, occur here in the Cascades.

Most of the berries I have picked this year have gone to my daughter. She really likes them. With the first batch she started out eating one at a time. After several berries, it became two at a time, then she started eating them by the fistful until they were gone, at which point she demanded more. 

This is the yield for about 15 minutes of effort. 

Yield for about 30 minutes of effort. This is the most recent batch I picked this year. The berries were pretty big for wild strawberries, making the job go faster. I like to hull the berries as I pick them. The brownish flakes amongst the berries are old flower petals.

Vashti digging in.

This, of course, is not a strawberry. It is a salmonberry and they have been ripe for the last several weeks. This is Vashti's other favorite berry (for the time being). I am not unfond of them myself. We have been giving her lots of these berries as well. We will have to keep an eye on her and, as soon as she can understand, make sure she knows which berries are okay to eat and which ones are not. 

Community Hall Work Party

I spent the day Saturday running errands and getting a couple early loads of hay and rearranging tools. 

Sunday there was a work party at the Marblemount Community Hall. A dozen or so people showed up. Many of them were the regulars that usually show up for these types of things but there were some new faces as well.

In about 7 hours we got a number of things done.

Yard work was one of the first things on our list. The vegetation is relentless this time of year and the mix of rain and sun really made things grow. The lawn was mowed as well as weedeating the edges around the buildings. The back of the hall was particularly bad. Blackberries were growing into the shake siding and would have eventually pried the shakes off if left alone. In addition, a troublesome maple clump and a holly tree both growing right at the edge of the building were removed along with a lot of thick brush. We also weeded the gravel in the playground area.

Inside, the hall was spruced up with some new decorations added and the bathrooms and kitchen were deep cleaned.

We also worked on some infrastructure projects. A water line was excavated in order to install a new outdoor spigot but it was determined that we did not have the proper fittings so the hole was temporarily covered until we could get the right parts. We also inspected several areas where the floor of the hall was sagging and determined the materials needed to fix this problem.  

All the help was greatly appreciated. As the old saying goes “Many hands make light work”. 

Receiving instructions for operating the riding mower.

Blackberries grown into the shake siding of the hall. The vines would eventually pry the shakes off. It is important for the life of a building in this area to keep the vegetation down around it. Vegetation traps moisture, increasing the rate of decay of wood and harbors insects that eat wood.

Excavating to add new water spigot. 

Pictures of the Week. 6.15.13

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, summer 2006, Upper Skagit River watershed. It took me almost a day and a half of walking to get to this spot. Almost a day of this walking was off trail bashing through thick brush and getting my hands and forearms scratched and filled with thorns. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, summer 2006. Sunset from a spot near where the previous photo was taken. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, summer 2006. Day 2 of a four day trip. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, summer 2006. Day 3 of a four day trip. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, summer 2006. Day 3 of a four day trip. The boulder perched near the top of the waterfall is well over 5 feet tall. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, summer 2006. Day 3 of a 4 day trip. The "stripes" on the mountain are dikes or sills. Dikes and sills are formed when superheated water carrying dissolved minerals are injected into cracks in the rock. As the water cools, the minerals in solution, in this case probably mostly quartz, precipitate out leaving a deposit. Dikes form in vertical cracks and sills form in horizontal cracks. The reason I don't say whether these "stripes" are definitely either dikes or sills is that I don't know. These mountains have experienced so much folding that the deposits pictured may originally have been horizontal now moving to vertical or vice versa. 

Naked broomrape (Orobanche uniflora). This plant is completely parasitic. The leaves around the flowering stem are saxifrage leaves. The broomrape is feeding off the saxifrage plants as it has no leaves of its own and cannot produce its own food. 

Naked broomrape (Orobanche uniflora). This photo was taken in the mountains but it is also common on the beach. 

Common butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris). This plant grows in wet areas.  It is insectivorous, meaning it eats insects. This is how the plant to obtains important nutrients that are not available in wet areas which are typically nutrient poor. The little black dots on the leaves are gnats that get caught in a sticky substance on the leaf surface. Once an insect is trapped, the leaf curls up around it and digests it. Apparently, only smaller insects are vulnerable to this plant as I have seen ants walk across the leaves without even slowing down, though you could see the sticky substance on the leaves clinging to the ant's legs as they walked. 

I have often found this plant in seeps on rock walls. Sometimes I have seen them in small sphagnum type wetlands formed around seeps on flat ground but I have not seen them in larger wetlands, though this does not mean that they are not there.

Walking the Dog

Our dog’s name is Skyeball. At the shelter where we adopted her, she was called Skye probably because she has one bright blue eye. I modified the name slightly to Skyeball to reflect the fact that she had one blue eyeball and the fact that she was a ball of energy.

She had been to the shelter twice by the time we adopted her. She is a smart dog but she has lots of energy and some major issues with impulse control. I think the previous folks might have gotten her because she is a pretty dog but when she started digging in the yard and escaping to run the streets, it was too much.

We have to keep her on a run which is not the ideal situation. In a perfect world I prefer to let dogs go free. Unfortunately in our world we live right on Highway 20 and there are a lot of people who drive very fast and very crazy on this highway, especially in the summertime. Since I was twelve years old, I have only had two dogs that died of natural causes. The rest were killed on the highway.

As a mitigation measure, I try to make sure to walk her at least a mile every day. Sometimes I will walk her twice. The usual route goes through the woods behind the pasture and out under the power lines to the back gate of the Stump Farm and back.

I have Skyeball trained not to chase deer and she is pretty good about not harassing other wildlife but I don’t take her into the backcountry on long hikes. This weekend the Sunday walk which included Sacha and Vashti stretched a little further into about three miles. Sunday was also the first wedding anniversary for Sacha and me.

I know the post is titled walking the dog but this was one of the many things that I did this weekend, including some minor repairs on the farm pickup's clutch, before I walked the dog.

All done. The Big Maple is in the woodshed and will be ready to heat the house next winter. Mark Twain, I think, said "Cut your own wood and it heats you twice." This tree has warmed me several times over already!

I figure this to be about three cord though I forgot to measure it.  I usually don't measure how much wood I cut in a year. If the shed is full and I have enough for the winter, I call it good.

Now to the subject of the post. This is Skyeball the dog.

This is Skyeball's house. The recently trimmed grass is hiding the craters she has excavated. The bare soil and the few visible holes give an idea of the extent of the devastation. This area is much too uneven to mow.

On the loose and heading for the trail at the back of the pasture.

Through the woods.

On this walk my wife and daughter came along. It was our one year wedding anniversary. There is a lot of family history in this photo. This is the Seattle City Light transmission right-of-way. It also used to the railroad grade. My dad was born in a cabin near the furthest tower just visible in the photo. My Aunt Betsy who died of diptheria at age 9 is buried near there also. When they weren't working, my dad and aunts and uncles ran around here as they were growing up. They managed to dodge all the trains with a few close calls (My Aunt Nora plucked my dad off the tracks just in front of a train. It was so close that the engine tore her skirt off as it passed by. This engine was probably Old Number 6 which is now sitting in Newhalem as a tourist attraction.). My dad spent much of his career with Seattle City Light working under these transmission lines. He never got to see his granddaughter but she looks a lot like him. 

On the move along the right-of-way. This is also the route we use to move the cows. Most of the time Skyeball and I turn around at the back gate to the Stump Farm. Last year I saw a cougar right about here. This was the first I have ever seen on foot, though I have seen quite a few from vehicles on the road. 

This day we went further up the road and up an old fire trail now used for recreation.

The turn around point. Another of my family's old haunts. 

Nap time. Vashti didn't quite make it back before falling asleep.