Friendly to wildlife but no reciprocation

Our estate has been designated a wildlife friendly "yard" and certainly it provides cover and shelter, water, and food.  Here in the last category is the problem; wildlife and the Phactors disagree about what is for wildlife consumption. Generally some fencing and and other restrictive placements help with the definitions, but what with all that is provided a bit of reciprocation would not be a bad thing. OK for the most part house plants outside for their seasonal R&R are off limits, but TPP forgot how little bun-buns are at the outset, so a quite small bunny able to fit through 2" fence ate an orchid, not just a nibble, ate it down to the base.  Then there's the strawberry problem. Someone doesn't wait until they even ripen, so you don't stand a chance, and the bed is pretty well fortified, but someone found a way in, one of the tree rats probably.  A good country-living friend has a strawberry bed that looks like a well-fortified prison camp, and a raccoon still helped himself to every berry available. Unlike deer at least raccoons leave the plants. What TPP desires is for some top predators to know how friendly our yard is if they wish to eat some herbivores, and although mostly the birds understand what is for them and not, Mrs. Phactor says the herons can stay away from her lily pond fish. 

What's in a name? Strawberry?

The origins of plant names is fun, fascinating, and frought with ambiguities for those who choose to figure some of them out. English as a conglomerate of languages has more than its share of strange word origins. Strawberry is one of them. Now the genus is not much of a problem. Fragaria - clearly from the same root as fragrance, and, oh, do ripe strawberries smell good! But what's straw got to do with these berries? Perhaps this is one of those sound alike sideways changes that are so perplexing. Maybe they were strewberries; to strew meaning to sprawl along the ground, which certainly describes their growth pattern by runners, stolons. Even more interesting is the Shrewsbury Cake, sort of a short bread cake with a strawberry jam layer in the middle. Could this have been a strewberry cake, rather than a confection named for a small city in the UK? Well, who knows, and if you have some ideas to add, well, do tell. But the Phactor just picked a couple of quarts from our little patch, so guess what we're having for dessert?

Strawberries & Indian Strawberries

One of the worst weeds of strawberry (Fragaria) is Indian strawberry (Duchesnea indica). In flower and fruit these two species are easy to tell apart (yellow flowers, 5 bracts, red achenes), but early in the season the leaves are quite similar (Indian strawberries have sharper teeth on the leaf margins), but if you aren't sharply observant it can be the devil's own time to weed out the invasive Indian strawberry, especially when fairly abundant. Good thing the Phactor has experience and observational experience to sort them out without any mistakes, but it isn't easy.