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Loved your story on white apricots but since i was a kid, summer always meant the sweet smell of strawberries

Probably nothing beats the taste of a just-picked, sun-ripened strawberry. Strawberries are loaded with natural sugars, but these sugars rapidly convert to starch once the berry is picked. Strawberries can be grown in a greenhouse year-round, but not without a little help from you . Owning a greenhouse has been a way of providing our guests here at the Fish Creek House B&B in Southwest Montana with quality, fresh and mostly organic fruits and vegetables.

So it is not mere pride that makes a freshly picked home-grown strawberry taste better - it really does. The fresher the berry, the sweeter the taste. Strawberries are high yielders. From a single, well-cared-for 2-year-old plant, you can expect to harvest 1 to 2 quarts of strawberries. That's 50 to 100 quarts of berries from a bed 15 feet long and three plants deep - about 50 plants.

Keep Planting Strawberries

You can maximize yields by continually renewing your strawberry bed with new plants. Many gardeners try to keep old plants producing year after year, but this inevitably leads to decreased yields and increased disease problems. You can start out in the spring with ten plants that will each produce five healthy daughter plants in the first year - and they'll bear an abundant crop of strawberries the second year. Keep two beds in rotation and every year you can count on 50 to 100 quarts of juicy red berries - enough for about thirty strawberry-drenched shortcakes and fifty pints of preserves to enjoy all winter and fifty helpings of Sunday brunch strawberry waffles, not to mention the sweetest possible berries for eating straight out of the garden. Visit us at http://www.fishcreekhouse.com

We try and mix it up by adding a non-traditional latke recipe to our big family Hanukah party. My favorite is a three color latke done with zucchini, sweet potatoes and yukon golds...looks great...excellent fry-ability that produces a nicely varied texture. I have served them as a 'latke sandwich' with lox and dab of sour cream mixed with fresh dill.

Chappy Chanukah to all!

Wait a minute - I'm no Jew, though I grew up with plenty of them (it's what happens when you live in NY), but isn't meat + cheese a big no-no?

My favorite way to make alt latkes is to add the spices from one of Madhur Jaffrey's potato recipes (from Spice Kitchen) to the mixture.

Though if my mother says one more time "they're very good but you can't call them latkes," there may be matricide.

Mmmm. Horseradish sauce. Sounds fantastic! I was thinking I might make sweet potato and parsnip latkes for a change this year. Thanks, Ed!