Stawberry Testing Fields

Yesterday I wrote about the garden. We really have a nice one. I learn a lot working in it.

There is a rhythm in gardening that simply can't be ignored. Brute force and frantic bursts of energy don't get you much. Patience is good, and persistence.

Strawberries are coming in right now. We picked the first two this past Thursday. More were ripe on Friday. Saturday there were more. Last night I picked a couple of pints of berries. We have enough on the vine to have a fair crop of berries this year.

This is great, because we put in a new strawberry patch last year, replacing the old one. Its not huge, around 6 feet long, semi-circular, around 3 or 4 feet wide at its widest point. The old one was huge for a city lot. Almost 20'x20'. Unfortunately, when the new driveway was put in, the berry patch had to go. We did move the topsoil to a great location. This had been worked and improved for many, many years and was fantastic for growing things.

Last year, we planted tomatoes in that soil, as we had the year before. Oops. No tomatoes there this year thanks to the blight.

BUT - the new strawberry patch is doing extremely well.

As I was picking berries last night, my dear lady-wife made the observation that sometimes beautiful ripe berries will "hide" under the leaves or tucked out of the way. So, as I was carefully going through picking what I could find, it dawned on me that shifting leaves and plants may help, or may not.

Something struck me though. As I was working in one area, I looked over toward where I had just been working, I saw three lovely ripe berries - right where I had decided I had found everything that was ripe and moved on.

In shifting my view, my perspective, I found three berries where a moment before I absolutely "knew" there were none ripe.

It dawned on me then and there, that the challenge in finding bugs is overcoming our own solid "knowing" that we have finished. If you change your perspective, and look again, are you still finished?

Does this shift in perspective reveal you things you did not know? Are there items you may not have considered? In shifting your view do you find bugs you would have missed?