I was given strawberry runners and (stupid me) I planted them. The strawberries were large and sweet and my hens loved them. I never ate any, after tasting one.
The strawberries attracted leeches and slugs, and a small lizard.
Next thing they had runners and the runners had runners. They took up an entire side garden. I tried pulling out most of them. More grew so I poisoned them. Three months later I now notice two or three trying to grow again, so will also poison them when the rain stops.
I believe strawberries are a noxious weed. :-)

When they're about the size shown in the photo, they don't have any taste.  (I've eaten several of them, so I have a pretty good sample set.)

So, black nightshade berries you'll taste but spit out rather than eat, but wild growing berries in bright red poison warning colors you'll eat because they look like little strawberries? 

Well, I'll just warn you that if you get one of those "I've been hired to kill you" eMails, I think you best not eat anything resembling strawberries for 72 hours.  Just saying . . .

I am not convinced those are the true wild strawberries, the fraises du bois that I picked as a child and that taste absolutely lovely. There's another item that looks very like them but actually is larger. Kind of darker and furry, too. I will talk to my family plant expert tomorrow and get that name. I know he has eaten the lookalikes and said they're flavorless. Also harmless.

Here are some photos taken on the afternoon of April 14th.

Light blue Bearded Iris:





Yellow Bearded Iris:








Holly flowers:   





As I've mentioned before, the holly is a particular favorite of mine due to the flowers' aroma.  It's also a favorite of the bees, and when the tree's in bloom, they're all over it.  I like to stand under the branches, inhale the aroma, and let the constant drone of buzzing bees lull me into a pleasant zen-like state.   


Wild strawberry:





Before anyone gets too excited about the strawberries, here are a few unfortunate facts...

When they're about the size shown in the photo, they don't have any taste.  (I've eaten several of them, so I have a pretty good sample set.)  If I give them more time to grow bigger, then the squirrels and other critters will eat them before I can pick them.  And they're growing in the shade, so they're unlikely to fully ripen anyway even if the critters weren't an issue.  So they're basically just an interesting weed.   

I have no idea how they got there, by the way.  I certainly didn't put them there.  This is only the second or third year I've noticed them.  I can only guess that some animal pooped out some seeds after eating some strawberries somewhere else.   

Back in the day, when a romance writer would get her first Harlequin contract and an advance of $1,200, the received wisdom was to plow it all back into promotion. The idea was to create enough sell-through to encourage Harlequin to offer a multi-book contract. At that time, back end royalties for a simple Harlequin could be around $18,000, so diverting the advance to promotion efforts was not using up a large percentage of your total earnings for the book. What I've heard in recent years is that the advance is all you'll get. A far different picture, and I understand the royalty break has hardly budged this century, too.

There remain today good reasons for dealing with trad pubs: them getting your books into physical bookstores, them getting you reviews from big deal reviewers and possibly attention from big name media, and them selling sub rights--especially to film/television/streaming as well as other markets. The value of that may not have a direct dollar figure but it is substantial. But if they don't do anything beyond getting your books into bookstores, they aren't doing their full job. At a conference I went to recently, a veteran publicist said the typical publisher's publicist has 30 titles to work on at a time and job churn is major. It follows that if yours isn't the lead title that month, you're not going to get much attention at all from these overworked people. So self-publishing and self-promotion don't seem like such a bad deal after all. You probably will end up doing more for your book than the publisher would.