Don't go nuts, go berries!

Eating berries has beneficial effects on your brain and may help prevent age-related memory loss.  Right.  Hmm, now where was this published?  Oh, yes, just ate a grape, and there it is, the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.  But grapes?  Well, yes!  A grape is a berry, and the article says blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, and other berry fruits.  Of course, two of the three are not berries technically, but apparently something (anti-oxidants?) in fresh berry fruits helps your brain function.  How about tomatoes?  Kiwifruit?  Naranjillas?  Currants?  Persimmons?  Poke berries? Clearly all berries.  Will my health insurance buy me some new strawberry plants as a preventative measure?  But here's what the Phactor really thinks; it's Berry-Go-Round that keeps your gray cells gay, er, gray.  Picture credit here.  Oh, and most of those wild berries are not edible, so know your berries.  

Transitioning - Asparagus to strawberries

Never, never has the Phactor been so late at getting his kitchen garden planted. The weather gods have really been unfair, so thank goodness for perennials. So as asparagus season ends, the strawberries, inside their wire fortress, are ripening. The bed looked pretty dense, but then after weeding out the Indian strawberry, no task for any but the most observant, the bed was a bit more open. The berry crop will be OK, but not spectacular. The same will probably also be true for the blueberries and raspberries. And while everything else has languished, the weeds have been growing rapidly, so the behinder the gardener is.