Strawberries

There are strawberry stands all over Berlin. They’re shaped and painted like a strawberry and most of them sell only strawberries. I don’t know what happens when strawberry season is over. Do they import berries from somewhere in the south? Perhaps they sell other fruits: at least one stand we saw today displayed a few blueberries and a very few raspberries.

We bought our first box of strawberries a couple of days ago, and finished the entire half-kilogram in a few hours. Yesterday the local stand sold out before we got home, so we stopped on our way out this morning to see how long the operator planned to work today. She answered that she’d go home as soon as she sold out, and that yesterday she closed at 5:00. The customer ahead of us in line added that this stand tended to have the best strawberries and we should really buy immediately.

We bought elsewhere, late afternoon, and we are quite satisfied with what we bought. We learned that the stands feature strawberries from the Baltic coast and we took home some free strawberry cookbooks. The Baltic farmers are definitely encouraging German consumption, and they command a distinct price premium over the strawberries we’d been buying in Belarus. But it works: We see lots of people carrying Karl’s clear-plastic bags with beautiful strawberries inside.

From 2011-07 Berlin