I'm back from a week's vacation, fly-fishing and gardening.

The gardening was more productive than the fly fishing, but I enjoyed both.

Our strawberries produced just a few berries for a salad June 7, and have produced about five quarts since, and there are a few quarts ready on the vine if it stops raining enough for me to pick them.

This is about as early as I remember having strawberries, partly because of the sunny and relatively warm weather from April through mid-June. The prime variety is Earliglow, which is bred to be early and probably will be gone by before July 4.

We planted 25 plants of Mesabi – a mid-season variety – about 20 days ago, but they won't produce any this year. I've been picking off the blossoms. But it will extend our season next year.

In addition, I saw pods on some of our earlier peas. This means we should be having peas in about 10 days – which also will be somewhat early.

We had a couple of meals of asparagas over the vacation, but I have stopped harvesting that.

It is great to be getting food from the garden.

For anyone who cares, I caught five fish in about 10 hours of fishing. It wasn't hot and heavy. But I saw a moose, an eagle, rabbits, loons, ducks and a lot of iris along the river, and had a great time.

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