The fair and industrious Trudy bought some strawberries on a sunny weekend a while ago. A few days later we put some soil in a whiskey barrel and two old leaky buckets, and we planted the five little plants. We gently surrounded them with a little bit of pine straw and a three inches of native hardwood mulch. Then we went on a mission for coffee grounds, as we have discussed before.
A day after the planting, the jaggy green leaves of each plant were reaching for the sky. Trudy began to collect her own coffee grounds in a bowl instead of the compost pail. And each day we would check on their progress in the morning and afternoon.
One day a package arrived in the mail from my cousin Burt.
Trudy opened the box and pulled out a plastic bag holding something crumbly and brown, and she read a note that was scribbled in blue magic marker on yellow paper. It said, “We trust you will bring strawberries to the cottage!”
We looked at each other. We looked at the plastic bag. And we looked at each other again.
Was this … coffee grounds? Did they mail us coffee grounds all the way from Kentucky? I read the note again. And we inspected the bag really closely. Coffee grounds? Like, used coffee grounds? I opened the bag and smelled. Indeed they had sent us coffee grounds all the way from Kentucky.
A day later, bitterly cold weather descended from Canada. Temperatures dropped well below freezing at night. And a week after that, a colder front came with two nights in the teens. And although we tried our best to cover the five young plants, I am sad to report that it doesn’t look good. But…
Today it was sunny and warm, and the fair and industrious Trudy bought some more strawberry plants for us to try. We haven’t given up on the first batch, but at $1.50-a-bundle, we couldn’t resist. And you see, there’s this plastic bag of coffee grounds sitting on the kitchen counter than needs distributing.