It was looking like being the best strawberry crop ever. (Enough, even, to comfortably share them with a very large blue-tongue lizard, who has been seen helping himself.) But a couple of nights ago I though something looked wrong with them, and today, after a visit to the nursery, I have, on a rare day off work, had the sad task of pulling one entire patch out by the roots. Curse you, fungal infection.
I should, of course, have listened to my mother, who would never have allowed a strawberry patch to stay in for more than three years. They did so well last year that I thought, Another year can't hurt. And, as has so often proved to be the case (another example: "You are no handyman"), she was right and I was wrong.
