Singing the praises of the alpine strawberry

I grew these strawberries from the seeds collected off a rotten strawberry from my friend's garden, who grew hers from seeds from someone, so I have no clue what specific variety of strawberries these are.

I planted them last year after growing them inside for over a year where I pretty much neglected them. As you can see, they love their freedom in the garden! I think I had about 8 plants to start, definitely no more than that. One year later, they thickly cover more than a 4'x4' area in my raised beds. They send out lots of runners spring, summer, and fall.

They do not have to compete against grass but they have successfully shaded out every other weed. The few weeds that poke their heads above the strawberries are simple to pull out. The leeks are enjoying growing among them.

A benefit that I didn't foresee is that the small berries are good at hiding from pests, including slugs! The stems grow fairly tall and the berries are small so they stay up off the ground out of sight of the slugs but stay under the leaves out of sight of the birds! They make fruit until it gets cold. And they taste delicious!

I've grown alpine strawberries in my old suburban area and loved them, great part shade/shade edible. Where I live now we have some kind of native strawberry all over our property. I will take pictures tomorrow to post. The runners are red and beautiful. Regardless I'm a fan of lesser varieties.

Man, I love these strawberries! We are getting a few cups of ripe strawberries every day and the blooms just keep on blooming.

Meanwhile my regular strawberries are pouting because of the weather and we are only getting a few ripe strawberries every day even though we have three times as many plants.

We just got back from five days away and my regular strawberries went about a week without being watered. Most of the berries on those plants shriveled up without being watered for a week.

The alpine strawberries on the other hand...

I have watered them once this whole summer. I think it was back in mid June. So they have been a month without being watered (though there was a day or two of rain a couple of weeks ago). We got back to our house yesterday and spent the evening picking and eating all the ripe berries. Yum!

In another note, these are all seedlings from one rotten strawberry but the berries on the plants vary in size and shape. It's very interesting and I'm wondering if it is diversity in the genetics or just sensitivity to tiny differences in the location within the bed. The original strawberry was the size of the middle one out of three in the picture below and my friends strawberries were pretty uniform in size

We just had over a week of temperatures in the high 90°s up to 100°F and the strawberries still look lovely, blossoming and forming fruit.

That's amazing!!

I'm sold. If they will grow in N. California and I can find them. I'm going to plant some. Thanks.