Runner up

Well, the strippers have been busy. Busy producing leaves. Who cares about leaves? Leave it to strippers to bobble things up. In an effort to get strawberry production underway, I added some 20-20-20 fertilizer into the mix. Before, I was using MiracleGro 24-8-16 and attribute the nitrogen heaviness of that mix to the amount of foliage the girls produced. It's been about a week or so since the switch, and low and behold something new happened.

A runner happened. Punky Brewster kicked out a baby! That slutty girl. During research, it was tough to find a picture of a runner online. Like, a picture showing the difference between a runner and a normal leaf. Well, here you go. It looks like a long skinny skeleton finger and goes sideways. Mystery solved. According to 100% of the internet, to increase berry size or frequency, you're supposed to cut off all runners and tiny, abortable fruit sites. Well screw that, I want to see if the runner roots. So, I buried it in some of my signature fish tank gravel mix and wait.

Here's some photos of the ladies taken today. They're kicking ass with leaf making.

07/05/09 Album

~ Grow Monkey

Berry Facts

Found these facts while looking up grow techniques:

Here's a list of fun (They're not really fun) and interesting (or interesting) strawberry facts and trivia:

Madame Tallien - She used to bathe in strawberry juice

• A strawberry has, on average, 200 seeds
• If all the strawberries produced in California, in one year, were laid berry to berry, they'd wrap around the world 15 times
• Strawberries are the only fruit with seeds on the outside. It is argued that for this reason, it cannot be considered a real berry, since berries carry seeds on the inside
• Ninety-four percent of U.S. households consume strawberries at least once a year
• Strawberries often gain top positions in surveys as the favorite fruit: in 2007 over 53 percent of seven to nine-year-olds picked strawberries as their favorite fruit
• A French noblewoman at the time of Napoleon, Madame Tallien, used to bathe regularly in strawberry juice, using 22 pounds per basin. She didn't bathe daily though
• Strawberries have a long-dated history of medical uses, the Romans for instance used them to alleviate symptoms of fainting, kidney stones, inflammation, diseases of the blood, liver and spleen, throat infections, bad breath, attacks of gout, melancholy and fever
• The etymology of the name "strawberry" is still largely unproven: some argue that they were named in the nineteenth-century by English children who picked the berries, strung them on grass straws and sold them as "Straws of berries". Others theorize that the name was derived from the nineteenth-century practice of placing straw around the growing berry plants to protect the ripening fruit
• Charles V of France ordered, in the 14th century, that twelve hundred strawberry plants be grown in the Royal Gardens of the Louvre
• Strawberries are the first fruit to ripen in spring
• Strawberries were a symbol of perfection and love: for instance, folklore says that if you split a double strawberry in half and share it with a member of the opposite sex, you'll soon fall in love. Medieval stonemasons carved strawberry designs on altars and around the tops of pillars in sacred places such as churches, as a symbol of perfection
• 23,000 acres of strawberries are planted in California each year.
• The world's largest strawberry shortcake is hosted in the annual strawberry festival in Lebanon, Oregon
• In some places of Bavaria, country folk practice a spring ritual of tying small baskets of wild strawberries to the horns of their cattle as an offering to wood elves. The legend states that the elves, who love strawberries, will offer their gratitude producing healthy calves and an abundance of milk
• In Belgium there's a museum entirely dedicated to strawberries
• Strawberries are grown in every state in the United States and every province of Canada.
• The strawberry plant belongs to the same family of roses, genus Fragraria, together with other fruits such as apples and plums. The name of the genus comes from the Old Latin word for "fragrant". In modern Italian, the word for strawberry is still "fragola"
• California produces one billion (yes, with a B!) pounds of strawberries each year

Here's the original site.

Fungus

Misting is bad. Shit. Reading this page and I think there might be some mold on the ladies. There is a laundry list of diseases possible, so hopefully they will do better now that I'm not misting them anymore. It's tempting to scrap the whole thing and start off with better stock, but I'll see what happens.

Pictures

Album

So I figures it's time to put some photos up of the blackwater berries. Since they're true identities cannot be known, they were all given stripper names. There's Misty, Punky Brewser, Paris, and Raggity Ann. Raggity Ann is the one in the foreground. If you look closely, you can tell that she's the skank of the bunch and as such, not much is expected from her. She's the one that will get the rest kicked out of the bar if they ever go and probably get pregnant first, which is good in this case, because pregnancy means berries. Sweet, delicious unaborted berries. Then again, she's the one who looks full of diseases, so like teen moms there is a trade off here.

Not much is expected for now, but I figure in a week or two it'll be worth it to take a few more snapshots.

No word on that strawberry stealing baby. I couldn't find any pressure-activated claymores at Wal-mart so instead there are rattles placed strategically over punji stick traps. It may be too soon to worry as there are no berries to steal, but you can never be too careful with babies. If there's something worth stealing/slobbering on/ruining, you're bound to have an infestation soon. Hopefully, the blackwater berry stripper codenames will act as a deterrent. Babies fear strippers because they cannot feed on them without getting a mouthful of silicone.

~ Grow Monkey