I’ve noticed last fall and this spring that if I miss a day picking strawberries, I seem to get less the next time I pick. I guess it’s the lack of slug and dead leaf removal that causes this problem. Or maybe I do have birds/rodents eating the berries.

I haven’t worked on my more recently planted berries in a while because I have been working so much on pulling dead leaves and plants out of the old berries, and of course picking the berries. Tonight I even picked up 2 5-gallon buckets of dead berries and leaves and grass I’d pulled out, and grass clippings, and put them into the compost pile I started (4/12). I got about a basket of berries.