Successes and Less Successful stuffs.

Today's conundrum: 

My first strawberry is blooming.  The gardening wisdom is that if you plant in springtime you should remove all of the flowers the first year so that you get much healthier plants and much more and bigger and healthier berries in following years.  I did not, however, realize how hard it would be emotionally to actually cut the flowers.  I went back and researched, and apparently everyone from gardening web sites to University Extension services to people who sell strawberries say that yep, you need to snip the flowers.  They say that maybe day-neutral or everbearing plants you could stop snipping  after June.  I knew that going in, and I planted June-Bearing berries in this planter.  So... I decided that I will let them bloom, but snip the flowers when they start to wilt so they don't put a lot of energy into the berry/seed production.

If the strawberry seeds I sowed in the other two planters don't germinate and grow, I will get more seed and try germinating in a controlled environment, then planting this fall, since they say that you don't have to snip fall-planted strawberries.

I knew going in that not everything in the garden would be a resounding success...  and so far the greatest failures have been garlic chives not growing yet, one of the lettuce varieties not surviving the frost/freeze cycles we had, a parsley plant that the squirrels stole, and spinach that started bolting before we got a real good harvest.  As far as the spinach goes, we will replant that for fall and hope it doesn't bolt, then try different varieties next year.  We have new parsley plants that have real root systems (the missing plant was an accidental "grew some small roots while we were keeping it alive in a bowl" plant, so didn't have the ability to stay planted when they tugged on it).  We can replant garlic chives and if that variety doesn't take get some other seeds... and the regular chives are taking off.