Strawberry season is either nearly over or completely over, depending on where you are in the country.  (We have maybe a week more here…got a late start this year!)  Raspberries are up next, then we’ll be into boysenberries, marionberries, tayberries, blackberries, blueberries…yum.

I had so many strawberries this year, I made four batches of jam, two gallons of strawberry ice cream, a batch of strawberry shortcake, and now a strawberry pie.  Strawberry pie is one of my favorite ways to eat fruit.  This recipe works with just about any berry, though.

I eated a piece before I thought to take a picture...

Whatever Berry Pie

• About 3 pints of whatever berries you have (all the same or a mixture)
• 1 cup of sugar (more if they are really tart, less if they are super sweet)
• 2 Tbls Clear Jel (or corn starch)
• Water
• One blind-baked pie crust (just means you baked it with nothing in it)*

Wash your berries.  Remove stems and cores from strawberries.  Line your baked pie crust with about two pints of the berries, depending on their size.  Don’t fill the crust all the way; leave room for the jelled part of the filling.  You can slice strawberries or leave them whole, other berries you can just pour into the pie crust.

Put the remaining berries into a saucepan, and crush with a potato masher or some other mashing instrument.  Add the sugar.   Pour about 3/4 cup of cold water into a small glass, add the 2 Tbls of Clear Jel or corn starch, and stir until completely dissolved.  Pour this into the berries and sugar.  Stir well.  Cook on medium heat, stirring constantly.  Bring to boil, and boil until the mixture thickens and turns clearer, about3-5 minutes.   Pour the thickened berry mixture over the fruit in your pie crust.  Stick in fridge until firmly set, several hours to overnight.  Serve with ice cream or whipped cream.

*So, er, about the pie crust.  You can get a premade frozen one at the store, and just bake it at 425 for about 20 minutes, and that’s fine.   Or you can get some of the Pillsbury pre-rolled dough, put it in your pie pan, and then do the same.  Or you can get a Krusteaz “just add water” mix, roll it out, then put it in the pie pan and bake.   (If you do either of the latter two, you should use a pie chain, pie weights, or dried beans to hold the crust down flat and prevent it from bubbling up or shrinking.)

Or you can make your own crust.  It’s not that hard.  It’s just a step further than the Krusteaz, really.  And it tastes better.

Pie Crust (one double crust or two single crust)

• 2 1/2 cups of all purpose flour, pastry flour, or a combination (I like about 1 cup of pastry flour to 1 1/2 cups of all purpose)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup of very cold butter, lard and/or shortening (I usually use 1/2 cup of butter, 1/2  cup of lard or shortening)
• Ice water

Measure the flour into a bowl.  Stir in the salt.  If you are using a combination of fats, take the shortening or lard and “rub” it into the flour, with your hands.  You’re aiming for a texture like corn meal or crumbs.  Then dice the butter finely and toss into the flour mixture.  Mix as little as possible, but distribute the butter evenly.  (If you’re using all one kind of fat, rub it all in, or cut it in with a pastry cutter or two knives.  It will just have a shorter flake to the crust is all.)   The final texture should be like coarse meal, and it should still have bits of fat in it.

Sprinkle the flour mixture with 1/4 cup of ice water, and toss with a fork.  Add more ice water and toss the mixture gently until it’s all dampened, and you can squeeze it into a ball.  Don’t knead, just gather and press.  The goal is to work the dough as little as possible, and keep it as cold as possible to keep the fats from melting into the flour.

Divide the dough in half.  Put one half in a ziploc bag in the fridge, save for another pie.   On a floured board and with a floured rolling pin, roll out your dough into a circle to fit your pie pan.  It’s easier to transfer to the pie pan if you roll it  up on your rolling pin, put it over the pan, then unroll it.  Flute the edges with your fingers, or just trim the dough to the edge of the pan.   Fill the crust with a pie chain, pie weights, or dried beans, and bake at 425 for 20-25 minutes until lightly brown.  Cool completely before filling with the berries.

I grow a lot of strawberries.  There’s nothing better than a fresh strawberry from the backyard, and I love to make jam and strawberry pie and strawberry shortcake.  At the end of the season, of course the berries send out runners and make new plants, so I have more and more and more plants.  The walkways around my raised beds are wood chips, and the strawberries think it’s the best rooting medium ever, so I have lots of healthy starts with healthy roots, as soon as I dig them all up.  Usually in the spring I dig them up, and replant them or give them away or sell them.

This year I decided to more than double the space I’m giving to strawberries.  The reality is, no one in my family eats that many vegetables, and the ones we do eat are rather boring, so I didn’t need quite as much space as I have.  Awesome, more strawberries means maybe next year I won’t run out of strawberry jam in March and have to wait for berry season to make more!   So I began digging up the berry bed and sorting starts, renovating the old plants, and getting ready to replant.  Then I discovered — them.

Strawberry Root Weevils. Ew.

Little white semi-circular grubs with orangish heads, curled up tight in the soil.   Sometimes one, sometimes a little patch with five or six.  AUGH.  Strawberry Root Weevils.  I’ve had them before, at my old house, but this is the first go-around with them here.  Rotten little critters, they’re beetle-like weevils in their adulthood.  Despite their names, the adults nibble the margins of leaves including strawberries, euonymous, peonies, and lilac,  and the grubs will feed on the roots of strawberry, raspberry, clover, spruce, Douglas-fir and other woody shrubs.  Articles will tell you they don’t do much damage, but my strawberries sure don’t like them.  They reduce yield and make the strawberry susceptible to stress and other diseases.

The small round spot in the middle of the picture was caused by root weevils.

When I dug up my berries, I found most of the older berries (2nd and 3rd year) had little in the way of “fine” rootlets, and some had outright damage to the roots and lower crowns.  While the plants were still growing, the root structure didn’t look healthy at all.  I ended up digging them out, and since I have so many young and very healthy starts, I will probably discard them.  If I didn’t have so many starts to repopulate the area, I would replant these; they’re not terminally ill, they’re just depressed.

Healthy strawberry roots, no weevil damage.

So what do you do about strawberry root weevils?  Me, I let my chickens follow me through the garden and toss them all the squirmy little nasty larvae, and the chickens love me for it.  But if you don’t have chickens, you can do what I also do…turn the soil and pick the grubs out by hand.  It’s a bit tedious, and you won’t get them all, but you should be able to make a good dent in even a large population in fairly short order.  The best organic control is application of parasitic nematodes in the family Heterorhabditis.  Remove the leaf debris first, and then apply the nematodes in late spring or early summer, when adults are out and eggs begin to hatch.  Nematodes can be purchased at many nurseries.  Ask for them at the counter, as they are usually kept refrigerated.  Application is usually with a sprayer, as the nematodes are mixed with water to apply.  (They’re not visible to the naked eye.)   There’s a good paper on the subject from the WSU Extension if you care to read the gory details!

Yesterday I went up into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest to go to Takhlakh Lake. We made it almost all the way before my daughter declared she was carsick and we had to pull over (never mind that I was also carsick; I can usually tough it out, but a four year old not so much.)

When we got out to walk around, we discovered a patch of huckleberries. It’s legal to take up to 3 gallons of berries per person for personal use each year, and those picking for personal use can pick anywhere in the area except for those sections marked and set aside for the Yakama Indian nation…so we picked. After rooting around for a bag, we picked a few cups and took them home with us. Not enough for jam, but enough for something. A pie? Cobbler? Ice cream? Finally decided on a critter called a “buckle.”

I’m not usually a great fan of berries or berry creations, but oh my. This was fantastic. Great hot out of the oven, still great cold, would be lovely with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream but stands completely fine on its own!

HUCKLEBERRY BUCKLE

BATTER
* 1/4 cup butter
* 1/2 cup white sugar
* 1 cup all-purpose flour
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice to taste (1/2 – 1 tsp each)
* 1/2 cup milk

FILLING
* 2 1/2 cups huckleberries
* 3/4 cup white sugar
* 1/4 cup flour
* 1/2 cup boiling water
* 1 tablespoon butter

Preheat oven to 375. Grease the bottom of a 9 inch square pan. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar. In a separate small bowl, combine flour, baking powder, spices and salt. Stir into butter mixture. Stir in milk; mixture will be thick and lumpy. Spread batter into the prepared pan.

In a large bowl, combine berries, sugar, flour and boiling water. Pour over the batter in the pan. Dot the top with remaining butter.

Bake in the preheated oven for 45 to 50 minutes. Eat hot. YUM!

Since moving to my new house, I’ve been intent upon getting a new pair of columnar apple trees. I had two in my old, smaller suburban backyard, and they were wonderful. The Emerald Spire grew to about 10 feet tall and less than 3 feet wide, and had apples bunched on it so tightly they looked more like giant grapes. The Northstar was shorter at about 7 feet tall, and it didn’t have as many apples on it, but it was so unobtrusive and small you might never even realize it was a full fledged apple tree unless you looked closely!

We have enough room in our new yard for full size apple trees, but I’m a big fan of “less is more”, since it means I can plant more variety if I keep the individual plants small. And they were so easy to care for and productive I wanted to repeat the process.

Went looking for some of them at the local nursery, didn’t find any. One of the workers there pointed us northward to another nursery, so today we trekked off in the rain and the wind to visit both Bird’s English Garden nursery and Tsugawa’s. The former was a complete bust; most of their stock was in very sad shape, and they had little stock to begin with. The only staff in sight was a non-communicative young man doing something with a backhoe. The latter nursery, however, was a total win! If you happen to be in Northwest Oregon or Southwest Washington, I highly recommend Tsugawa’s, right off the freeway in Woodland, WA. Helpful, friendly staff, healthy and interesting plants, great little store inside, lots of water plants and a wide selection of bonsais to boot!

We ended up with three varieties* of columnar apples, two dwarf cherries, a self-pollinating peach, a four-way almond, a quince, two hazelnuts, five blueberry bushes, two honeyberry bushes, and a bright pink “Valley Valentine” Pieris japonicus. We needed a forklift to get it all back to the truck, drove all the back roads home to avoid doing 70 on the freeway, and now we just have to get it all in the ground!

* For anyone new to growing apples, cherries, blueberries, or many other varieties of fruit, there’s a reason I purchased in multiples: many fruit trees and berry bushes need a different variety to provide pollination. If you purchase only one apple tree, for instance, your apple yield will be poor or non-existant. Blueberries are well-known for this requirement. There are varieties that are self-pollinating, and there are trees with multiple varieties grafted to a single rootstock that will self-pollinate. If you don’t know if your tree or shrub needs a pollinator, look it up on the Internet, or ask your nursery staff.