Freezing Strawberries

I have a strawberry patch, if you can call it that. It doesn't produce hardly anything and I have not treated it well. I get so much going on. Too many irons in the fire and so some things get neglected. The strawberry patch is one of them. I may just till it under next year.

So, since I am a strawberry patch keeping failure, I look for strawberries when they are on sale and I freeze them. Yes, I am too cheap to get the wonderful strawberry patch ones, the ones that taste superb. But, at $15.00-$18.00 for a gallon, I just can't see fit to cough that up. That is on the bucket list for someday. :) Every year strawberries go on sale, usually for .99 for 1 lb. At that time, I buy a lot and freeze them. But, alas, this year they never were at .99 that I saw. Everything just keeps going up. So, while I was waiting for the .99 sale, I passed on the $1.19 sale. Finally, here we are in Aug and I bought these for $1.29 lb before I lose out altogether.

While I was at Aldi, I did some price checking. Right now while supplies last, you can buy 1 lb of frozen strawberries for $2.19, marked down from $2.29. I have a feeling this means they will go up come winter. So 6 lbs of frozen strawberries right now would cost $13.14. I paid $7.74 for 6 lbs. of the fresh ones. If we do this type of comparison, I saved $5.40. But what if I waited until winter? Fresh strawberries cost quite a bit in the winter, let's just say $2.49 lb for a rough estimate. That's $14.94 for 6 lbs. for a difference of $7.20 for the ones I bought today. So, I saved between $5.40 and $7.20 for what took me a half an hour of labor today. Let's multiply that and we get between $10.80 and $14.40/hour, tax free. Not too bad. Give yourself a raise with your labor today. :)