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Strawberries - An underrated fruit?

 
Steward of piddlers
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Strawberries


A memory that comes to me from time to time was a school fieldtrip where I got to pick strawberries at a young age around eight years old. A lovely older woman taught me how to find the biggest strawberries by checking under the leaves. I consider it a formative moment for me towards appreciating agriculture.

Last year, on a whim, I received a handful of strawberry starts that I planted in several beds around my property. To confess, I didn't have a plan for them. I just put them where I could find a spot and essentially forgot about them. Color me surprised when they established aggressively in a shaded bed that hasn't been able to grow anything but hosta and ferns. Continuing the theme of neglect, I spread the thinnest layer of straw on top of them before winter and let them go. Wouldn't you know, I have a ton of strawberries plants greening up.

Do you grow strawberries? Do you have any tips or tricks? Share your experiences.

Related Threads
How to Permaculture a strawberry patch?
Strawberries
Strawberry Varieties

Videos

 
Timothy Norton
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I currently am having good success growing everbearing strawberries (Albion) in raised beds.

They put out a bunch of runners and spread readily. They have been resistant to diseases and overwintered nicely in USDA zone 5b. They seem to enjoy their semi-shaded bed they are in.

This year, I am focusing on producing fruit that the local wildlife won't rip through fully. I know there will be loss, I just hope to enjoy some myself! I believe my approach to this will be to establish a large patch in order to share.
 
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I love growing strawberries and picking them right off the plant to pop into my mouth.

I feel strawberries are one of the most popular fruits.

I see folks coating them with chocolate or dipping them into cream cheese.

I like mine fresh out of the garden best.
 
gardener
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I love strawberries. They have been an easy groundcover for us. The only drawback has always been that they ripen when the birds have chicks so it's a fight to get to eat many.

Watching the parent/child teaching sessions with the robins was pretty cute but I would still prefer to get my actual fruit. I even tried the painted rock trick and it didn't do much.
The only thing that worked well was to do the white pineberries. They have a milder flavour but are still good. They are the only ones I moved from our old place.
A friend built a 4 section fenced area for his. They are all different ripening times and he can net over what is ready, to protect them. A lot of work, but they got a great haul. They gave me a bunch of plants that had escaped their protected zones, so I'll see if we can beat the wild eaters to some this year since I have put in a bunch around our young hazelnuts.
 
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I think strawberries are a bit like apples, with the equivalent of “red delicious” supermarket berries giving many a distorted impression of how good they can be when grown regeneratively and eaten right off the plant.
 
Timothy Norton
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I might be missing something obvious, but why would somebody rather a june bearing strawberry variety than an everbearing? Do june bearing have an advantage?
 
Ben Zumeta
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Timothy Norton wrote:I might be missing something obvious, but why would somebody rather a june bearing strawberry variety than an everbearing? Do june bearing have an advantage?



I think the main advantage is for larger producers hiring labor for picking and processing all at once.
 
pollinator
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we have a lot of doodle bugs that love the berries ...so, I like to plant in containers so the berries hang over the edge in the air.
 
pollinator
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If one has strawberries in a pot they can bear fruit for three summers in my experience from growing them when I was a kid.  The fourth summer they were shrivelly and nasty.  But if you have a patch of them they will spread with those runners so new plants will establish every year and it will be a tangle of berries and they'll just keep regenerating each year from what I've been told because of the spread.
 
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Timothy Norton wrote:I might be missing something obvious, but why would somebody rather a june bearing strawberry variety than an everbearing? Do june bearing have an advantage?



If you want fresh eating, then you want something that produces a little over time. If you want to harvest and store them in some way, then it is often easier to harvest and freeze them all at once. It is much easier to freeze 20 quarts of strawberries in a single batch, than it is to get out your stuff for 1 quart each 20 times.

On a side note, my kids are turning into strawberry snobs  We didn't have any fresh left, and just got frozen store bought. They were complaining the store bought didn't have as much flavor and were sour. While I told them to eat them anyway... I also used it as an excuse to talk about how local food is much fresher and can be picked at the right time.
 
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Timothy Norton wrote:I might be missing something obvious, but why would somebody rather a june bearing strawberry variety than an everbearing? Do june bearing have an advantage?

I agree with Matt - but not just from the bulk processing direction.

Everything likes strawberries - bugs, slugs, bunnies, deer, and in particular, Robins. The only way I'll get any is to protect them, which takes effort, but also, if there are lots of them all at once, the odds go up for me getting a decent number for myself, since many of the above mentioned strawberry lovers, tend to take one bite out of each fruit... sigh...

Also, all the everbearing varieties I tried, seemed to only last a year or two, whereas my June bearing ones have gradually moved around my property for the last 30 years. Yes, they're not huge like the modern strawberries, but they actually have flavour! Antique strawberries for the win!
 
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For some reason I have had difficulty growing strawberries. Two years ago??? I finally grew gorgeous strawberry plants that were producing well, and I didn't get 1 berry. If the Birds didn't get them the slugs did.
Last year I built a bed with a chicken wire top. I put bare-root strawberries in. So far so good, they are looking good. I have solved the bird problem.  Being a new bed hopefully I won't have a big slug problem. It may be something I have to deal with in the future. Fingers crossed we actually get to eat strawberries this year.
IMG20240328194223.jpg
Strawberry bed
Strawberry bed
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[Thumbnail for IMG20240328194259.jpg]
 
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I love strawberries.  Over the years have learned many great things about strawberries. They are the only fruit that has the seeds on the outside of the fruit. They also have a unique fiber that actually removes heavy metals in the body.  Gosh and they taste so great and are so good for you that we should plant more. I am planning a new planter just for strawberries that should give me about double my normal yield and so we can enjoy those nice cool evenings having strawberry shortcake of just a bowl of mashed up strawberries with a little coconut sugar on them or pure maple syrup. Hope you all enjoy strawberries as much as I and we do. Cheers.
 
pollinator
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We have 3 nice beds of strawberries.  Last year "Our" harvest wasn't very good, but the grandkids harvest was excellent!!  ;-)
I was so wonderful to hear and watch as the 2 to 4 year olds found them.  I may have to start a couple more beds of them so we can have some ourselves.

2 years ago I started a new bed of Asparagus and Strawberries.  Am looking forward to harvesting the asparagus this year.  Wanted to last year but decided to let it get better established.  The strawberries there are huge and tasty.
 
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I bought strawberry plants and asparagus roots this year but they haven't arrived yet (5a) I went with June bearing but am considering adding everbearing next year.

Does anyone have a reason I shouldn't mix the 2 types of strawberries together?
 
Timothy Norton
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I have two separate areas where I am growing strawberries. Over the winter, I protected the plants with straw to help them deal with the cold.

One bed, I pulled the straw mulch back while the other one I left the straw intact. The bed that I had pulled the straw back has 'woke up' faster than the other one. My non-scientific explanation to myself has to do with either the sun being able to contact the dirt warming it faster or the plants themselves. Perhaps the straw's light color reflects heat and keeps the soil cooler?
 
Dennis Barrow
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Strawberry plants are waking up !!
The really GOOD news is I will harvest my first asparagus in a few days!  Grows great with the strawberries!!
 
master pollinator
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Mmmm! First strawberry this year!

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Strawberry plant in mulch
Strawberry plant in mulch
 
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I love this series, Timothy, it's hilarious when you choose the most popular fruits of all time for the list, like the strawberry.

However, the unmanaged stoloniferous strawberry is an underrated ground cover. It's the one I use the most, currently, and it produces fruit on top of being attractive and being easy to manage.

Growing strawberries from seed is also an underrated practice. There are like 2 dozen common commercial varieties, and half of them have been around since the sixties.

There's lots of breeding work being done, don't get me wrong, Driscoll's pops 1.5 million seeds a year, for example, but unless you're growing strawberries from their seed, you're not seeing much of their work until someone uses their genetics in their own breeding work. Heh.

Still, though it's a patience game germinating strawberries, it's worth playing with, especially if you have multiple varieties/species growing in your yard. You can then happen upon chance crosses or even get a bit more intentional about it.

And, I'd say wild strawberries are underappreciated, even if they're highly rated. The flavor is immense, the fruit is tiny, and the natural range is... the entire temperate world. There are several species of wild strawberries, Virginiana being the most common species in the US, and they take on regional differences.

Wild strawberries will also, I've learned, behave very differently at 9000' vs 4500' elevation. The ones I harvested at 9000' were tiny, rugged plants that produced very little foliage, tons of runners, and little fruit clusters held tight to body of the plant. The same plants in my garden still throw lots of runners, but they have a larger mounding habit, grow 6" tall rather than hugging the ground, and produce fruit on longer, drooping stems rather than tight to the body.
 
Timothy Norton
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Chance Lunceford wrote:I love this series, Timothy, it's hilarious when you choose the most popular fruits of all time for the list, like the strawberry.



I'm glad you are enjoying the series! I have to admit, I may of embraced the click bait strategy that some creators use to draw attention to the thread!

Thank you for your words on wild strawberries. I have an unintentional 'patch' that I have let grown on my property but haven't really paid much attention to. I may have to see if I can conduct some seed-growing experiments for the fun of it.
 
Chance Lunceford
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There's another reason to grow strawberries from seed.

Strawberries are susceptible to pathogens, like viruses, which are passed on from the mother plant.

They can accumulate more viruses over time, and you'll experience decline in productivity, fruit quality, vigor, etc.

It's not like bare roots are expensive, but it's also free to grow about a hundred strawberry plants from one strawberry.

Plus, it lets you trial for disease resistance. My white pine strawberries are looking sad this year, and I've been pulling a bunch in anticipation of adding around 150 bare roots from 6 varieties next year.

We'll see how it goes, but part of the reason for the diversity is to improve the gene pool for my seedlings. I'm looking to naturalize in my project area.
 
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Never thought about virus accumulation being behind patch decline before, but it makes sense. I've had a bed that was really productive the first couple of years and then slowly just got worse, always assumed it was the soil. Might try growing some from seed this winter and see if a fresh start makes a difference.
 
Dennis Barrow
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I have 3 raised beds I grow strawberries in.  This year, one of the beds has had a serious decline of plants and no runners from them.  This bed was the most prolific of them all last year.   I am thinking there is some type of virus in it.  The beds are all 20 feet apart.

I was planning on replacing this bed this winter with a new one as it is starting to fall apart.  I am thinking I will not plant strawberries in the new bed as any virus in the soil would probably transfer to new plants.  I guess I will build 2 more beds, one with new soil for new strawberry plants.
 
Chance Lunceford
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Dennis Barrow wrote:I have 3 raised beds I grow strawberries in.  This year, one of the beds has had a serious decline of plants and no runners from them.  This bed was the most prolific of them all last year.   I am thinking there is some type of virus in it.  The beds are all 20 feet apart.

I was planning on replacing this bed this winter with a new one as it is starting to fall apart.  I am thinking I will not plant strawberries in the new bed as any virus in the soil would probably transfer to new plants.  I guess I will build 2 more beds, one with new soil for new strawberry plants.



This sounds like a job for crop rotation. You could have 5-6 beds and switch 1-2 out every year, then grow annual vegetables in the 2-3 empty beds.
 
Riona Abhainn
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When I was a kid I grew a pot of strawberries, the plants were given to me by a best friend.  They grew three summers and then went caput in summer no. 4.  It was one of my few gardening successes back before I got serious about growing things, so a couple of summers ago I got a strawberry plant and was excited to enjoy homegrown strawberries again.  But for some reason that plant didn't make it and never made berries.  I'll try again someday and now that I understand how the runners work I'll let them root and make a tangle of tastiness!  I'm biassed, but I think strawberries grown in the Pacific NW are the bestest strawberries, small and sweet and delicious.
 
Dennis Barrow
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Chance Lunceford wrote:

Dennis Barrow wrote:I have 3 raised beds I grow strawberries in.  This year, one of the beds has had a serious decline of plants and no runners from them.  This bed was the most prolific of them all last year.   I am thinking there is some type of virus in it.  The beds are all 20 feet apart.

I was planning on replacing this bed this winter with a new one as it is starting to fall apart.  I am thinking I will not plant strawberries in the new bed as any virus in the soil would probably transfer to new plants.  I guess I will build 2 more beds, one with new soil for new strawberry plants.



This sounds like a job for crop rotation. You could have 5-6 beds and switch 1-2 out every year, then grow annual vegetables in the 2-3 empty beds.



Chance, I do crop rotation on everything BUT strawberries and perennial herbs.  I do agree that it may be time to rotate my strawberries into different beds.
 
Chance Lunceford
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Right on, Dennis. I hope your bounty increases.
 
I agree. Here's the link: http://stoves2.com
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