Here is a picture of today's harvest.

And under the strawberries I got a handful of black raspberries. I will be making strawberry jam with my grandmother tomorrow. I collected 2 quarts of berries while she was in Alaska and froze them. The first berries we collected were much smaller and very sweet. They were coming in like crazy for about two weeks. I already made nine cups of jam. Then it really slowed down but there were still several blooms on the plants. The new berries coming in now are much bigger and just as sweet! The down side is the pests that keep showing up. Originally I kept seeing little tiny gray slugs, mostly just in the morning when the plants were wet. I didn't use any beer bait because when the plants were dry I didn't see any and the fruit didn't seem damaged. Then after the first burst of berries was done producing I found a couple of over ripe berries and as I was about to bite in I noticed a little tiny larva crawling around inside, and as I looked at any of the other berries still hanging on they had the larva too. Yuck!!! So I actually just ignored the patch for a week being turned off by the yucky critters. Then bigger berries showed up. Now the only berries with damage are then ones touching the ground, they have a little black insect of some sort aggressively feeding on them. The berries off the ground seem ok. I can't decide if this is big enough of a problem to combat or just collect the ones that are good? As for the raspberries I have had enough on my little bush to add to ice cream and an additional two cups to make a small cobbler. I think I'll get enough for another cobbler before it is done producing.
This is the monsterous thing that grew out of our compost pile. We actually had several plants growing from the compost but I just weeded most of them out when I turned the pile, but decided to save a few to see what would happen. So you would think that this giant plant would be producing a lot of fruit. (It is more than one plant but still all the leaves are huge compared to the ones I bought and put in the main garden. If you look below you can see that the fruit/vegetable doesn't resemble a zucchini or a squash, it looks like a hybrid. So I tried reading up on volunteers and know that they may produce lots of great green leaves and sometimes no fruit or fruit that just doesn't ever ripen, but why such a strange looking squash. I cut one open and it looks void of nutrients. If anyone has an answer please share! In the mean time Clay and I know we need to work on the compost pile. We finally moved the new material we were throwing out to the pile of horse manure we had dropped off by his boss. It just wasn't getting enough sun to get hot enough. Do we need to cover it with a tarp? I've still used the compost in the garden and even in some potted plants but we are getting volunteers everywhere so I know it didn't get really good and cooked.
Mystery vegetable.