Finally! The strawberries are ripe. A few weeks later than I'd fancy but it turns out it was worth the wait. This year the bounty was more plentiful. The red was redder and the berries were bigger, if somewhat mutant in shape.
Matt stayed with David and so Letty and I were free to pick to our heart's content with my sister and her husband, who came along for Sherpa responsibilities.
Apparently strawberry patches are Letty's happy place. She picked only the red ones even if they weren't the reddest of ones and she asked Aunt Beth every time if they were "right" (ripe). She had fun laughing to herself and telling us what the strawberries looked like, some like butterflies and some like Cinderella's pumpkin and some like well, strawberries. The very best strawberries she gave to her aunt or decided she would give to her best friend E. If you are in her good graces you are quite the luckiest soul.
Letty and I picked six quarts and the Sauders left with eight. We froze most of them in our house and had wonderful aspirations of making an amazingly moist strawberry cake. Letty didn't have faith in me... she may have been right.
And we may need to go the patch to pick more often than not.