Strawberries and Caneberries

Pretty interesting conference on biological control cooking for March 5 in Santa Maria overseen by colleague Farm Advisor Surendra Dara. I was invited too, but had to decline because of conflicts.

Just thumbing through a mail order catalog from a high end retailer yesterday afternoon for a Valentine's Day gift (don't forget all that this day is also our big annual strawberry production research meeting in Watsonville!) for my one and only, when my eyes lit upon the arresting photo below.

My colleague Oleg Daugovish has been super generous and is offering his annual caneberry meeting this year up in Watsonville so we can all be together and mites (including Lewis mite), substrates from an expert, plant nutrition, tunnel management, new variety evaluations for blackberries and raspber...

Just sampled some strawberries in white chocolate from Japan this afternoon for lunch (picture below). What's interesting is how dehydrated the strawberries are inside, they couldn't be bigger than the tip of my pinky finger. Great texture though, the berries basically dissolve in one's mouth.

The idea of "confirmation bias", which is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories, has been covered before in the abstract in this blog as being a route to erroneous judgment and mistakes on the farm.