divaqs's Blog
divaqs's posts about: Strawberries
Jul 5, 2007 | 11:07 AM PST
Tags: strawberries , garden strawberries , musk strawberries , alpine strawberries , everbearing , junebearing , tristar , seascape , whopper , capron , lipstick strawberries
When it comes to berries, Strawberries are definitely one of my favorites. To me, a strawberry that has been ripened to ultimate sweetness is a heavenly experience.
I used to think I would never have enough strawberries, that is, until I had over 300 different strawberry plants, which range across different cultivars and kinds.
I have at least 5 different kinds of strawberries currently growing in my yard. By request of AngelsGarden, I thought I would share which are my favorite and some of my experiences with them.
Overall, I like having a mix of everbearing and junebearing strawberries. The benefit of junebearing strawberries is that they have a whole lot of strawberries that all ripen about the same time over a few weeks. This makes it easier to be done with picking them. I like to freeze them for use over the months that fresh strawberries aren’t available. The benefit of everbearing strawberries is that their season is extended longer, allowing you to have fresh strawberries over a longer period of time. If it was possible to have everbearing strawberries year round, I wouldn’t need junebearing ones.
I have preference for different kinds of strawberries depending where they are planted. The way I look at it, there are normal garden strawberries, alpine strawberries, musk strawberries, ornamental strawberries, and wild strawberries.
Garden Strawberries
I believe that when people think of strawberries they are likely thinking of garden strawberries. These are the kind you see in the store and usually see offered in nurseries and have the recognized traditional strawberry flavor.
Everbearing Garden Strawberry
I am growing Tristar strawberries. At one time I thought these would be enough, that with their longer season from June until the fall, I wouldn’t need any other strawberries. However, this hasn’t proven the case in my situation. The strawberries are average in size and the plants spread their season over a longer time, with a slower rate of berry production than the junebearing varieties.
In my experience, they require full sun, fall/winter work in cleaning up runners and dead foliage, and watering during dry times. Of all my strawberries, these tend to be the ones that struggle the most with insufficient boron, which is evident by misshapen strawberries that look more like mutant red growths than something you buy in the store. So, this is something I watch for and occasional have to supplementally feed the trace nutrient of boron for.
Junebearing Garden Strawberry
I am growing two different kinds of junebearing strawberries, Seascape and Whopper.
I got the Seascape plants on a sale that I just couldn’t pass up. The plants tend to be a little bigger than my Tristar plants and the berries also tend to be a little bigger. The first berry of the year on that particular plant tends to be the biggest one of the season.
I ordered my Whopper strawberries from Gurneys. I was really intrigued by their description of them getting almost as big as peaches, which has proven to be true. The first berries on these plants are huge, almost as big as peaches. Their size requires some special care though. I’ve found that if the berries sit on the ground that sometimes one side of them could get over ripe while the other side is still ripening, so if you can, you will want to try to raise the berries up off the ground. Since I don’t have the patience or time to do this, I tend to not wait for these berries to get a dark red for this reason, but pick them when they are still a light red color. The taste is still pretty good.
The plants are also some of the biggest strawberry plants I’ve ever seen, with them reaching over a foot in height. This year I’ve had some problems with the weight of the leaves and runners laying down on top of the berries, hiding the berries pretty well under the mat of foliage.
In my experience both cultivars require full sun, fall/winter work in cleaning up runners and dead foliage, and watering during dry times. I do sometimes see some problems with boron deficiencies, but not nearly to the degree as I see in my everbearing Tristar plants.
Alpine Strawberries
Personally, I believe Alpine strawberries are all around the best strawberries for landscaping. I’ve written a lot about them in a previous blog entry, so I won’t go into so much detail today, other than to say that this week I was pleasantly surprised to see a stray alpine strawberry plant producing berries in a spot that never gets direct sunlight.
I am growing two different kinds of Alpine strawberries, Rugen and Yellow
In my experience, alpine strawberries can grow in full sun to full shade. They do require watering during dry times to continue producing berries, but seem able to recover even if allowed to dry out pretty bad. Very little fall/winter cleanup required of dead leaves.
Musk Strawberries
In the past, at a different house, I’ve grown Capron musk strawberries and the Profumata di Tortona varieties of musk strawberries.
I had these berries planted in full shade with just diffused light to grow with and yet they were still producing a lot of berries and spreading like crazy via a whole lot of runners. If you want strawberries that spread fast, require little light, and don’t mind that the berries are smaller than garden strawberries, then I’d recommend musk strawberries. One thing to be aware of is that musk strawberries require more than one variety to be planted, since they do need pollination.
Ornamental Strawberries
In the past I’ve grown lipstick strawberries.
These have a nice pink blossom, which is a nice change from the usual white blossom of other strawberry plants. They also grew much shorter than all my other strawberry plants, so would make a good low growing groundcover if you didn’t mind that their berry production is less than other strawberry plants.
Jun 21, 2007 | 8:52 AM PST
Tags: berry picking , strawberries , raspberries , blueberries
With over 300 strawberry plants, over 50 raspberry vines, roughly 20 blueberry bushes, plus at least another dozen or so other kinds of berry plants in my yard, I do a whole lot of berry picking. In other words, I get a whole lot of practice and plenty of time trying to figure out how to do it well.
Of the many different things to put picked berries in, my favorite is a milk jug with the top corner cut-off.
It is cheap, light, easy to wash, and has a good handle, so is easy to keep a hold of while crawling around berry bushes. I like using the half gallon jugs for my kids and the gallon jugs are about the right size for adults. Once the berry season is over, simply recycle or dispose of the jug, so it doesn’t have to sit around the rest of the year.
These are some things I have found helpful for me:
- While picking berries from your own yard, try to weed under the berry bushes. This not only makes it easier to spot future berries, but draws your attention down low, where ripe swollen berries often hide.
- Get to know your berry plants. For example, I last counted 5 different kinds of strawberry plants in my yard, each tends to ripen berries a little differently, with some being totally ripe when a nice dark red and others being totally ripe when mostly red, but never reaching a dark red color. I even have some that are ripe when an off white color. I taste some of the berries as I pick to get a sense of how ripe they are, as a sort of quality testing. My kids seem to do the tasting naturally, while I’ve at times have gotten so caught up with getting the chore of picking done that I have forgotten to do likewise, only to discover later that the berries weren’t quite as ripe as I thought they were.
- Be sure to pick up leaves, branches, vines, and look under. In many cases ripe berries are heavy and cause things to droop, which can make them more hidden in grass, under leaves, and so on. Typically, if I see one ripe berry it is a sign that there are more in that area that are hidden.
- Wash and soak the berries in water after picking them. It is best to have someone in the family that is not squeamish do this, since it is not uncommon for previously unseen bugs to appear once the berries are submerged for awhile under water. If you don’t mind extra protein with your berries, feel free to skip this. Personally, I prefer more bug free berries.
- If freezing berries, most do best by being initially frozen on a cookie sheet before being put in freezer bags. That way they aren’t all frozen in a giant chunk of berry ice when you are ready to use them. Blueberries and huckleberries can skip this step since they naturally don’t stick together when frozen.
I’d love to hear any berry picking tips that work for you as well.
Apr 26, 2007 | 9:55 AM PST
Tags: Strawberries , garden rock , retaining walls , corsican mint , thyme
I can’t speak for other places, but in the Seattle area it is common to see a lot of retaining walls built from large basalt or granite garden rocks stacked to form walls. When visiting Japan more than a decade ago, I saw some of these same garden rock walls, but they had been designed with a wonderful selection of plants growing out of them, which turned them into a beautiful extension of the landscape, rather than a purely plain and functional aspect.
When I bought my house, I discovered that the previous owners had scattered a couple of dump truck loads of large garden rocks all over the yard, in a seemingly random pattern. I spent a couple of years moving them to form retaining walls or rock stairways. It was great exercise and kind of fun moving all those 1 to 3 man size boulders around by hand.
While I had been building the rock walls, I realized that I wanted to beautify them like I had seen done in Japan, and definitely didn’t want the great southern light exposure to go to waste. So I backfilled the rocks with good garden soil and began planting strawberries and herbs in all the nooks and crannies that I could.
While this helped limit the expansion of strawberry plants, it presented extra challenges on them getting enough water, since water tended to drain down the backside of the rocks and sometimes miss the strawberries. I experimented with different soils and had the greatest success with a richer compost based soil, since it can retain water better. I also experimented with trying to form cupping shapes around the base of the plants with compacted compost, in order to catch and hold on to the water longer, which also seemed to help. The first year was the hardest and some planting years I seemed to lose about half of my new strawberry plants, but once they get a good root system, the strawberries seemed to do okay.
While the rockery does limit the strawberries aggressive expansion, it doesn’t completely stop it. Every spring I do need to still remove or move strawberry plants that spread into the bordering planting areas before planting in them. Without the natural control of the rockery, it would be much worse.
In this below picture you can see an example of the spread of strawberries into my planting area.
While cleaning up the bordering planting areas is when I usually move strawberries to new places among the rocks, or replace ones that died or are struggling.
I don’t just have strawberries growing in rocks, but also have a variety of herbs intermingled as well, such as Corsican mint and Creeping Thyme.
I am planning on expanding to including more edible plants intermingled among the rocks, but am planning on strawberries being the foundational plant in the design.
Apr 24, 2007 | 10:12 PM PST
Tags: strawberry , alpine strawberry , musk strawberries , Strawberries , landscaping , groundcover , edging , alpine strawberries
There is hardly anything to me that can beat the incredibly wonderful flavor of a sweet ripe strawberry that has been ripened fresh on the plant. While store bought strawberries are good, they just can’t match the sweetness and flavor of a strawberry grown and ripened right on the plant. Strawberries are definitely one of my most favorite of berries. So, I knew I needed to include them in my edible landscaping. The problem is that most of the strawberry plants you find are June bearing or everbearing varieties that require full sun and quickly spread in a seasons time via runners to consume all the space they can. That isn’t exactly something you would use in your typical yard landscape.
However, there are a couple of other options, namely musk (Fragaria moschata) or alpine (Fragaria vesca) strawberries . Both types can still produce incredibly flavored berries in partial sun settings, meaning they can be grown as ground covers under larger plants. While the berries are smaller in size, they have an even stronger strawberry flavor. It is as if all that flavor and sweetness of a larger berry was compacted into a smaller size. Some alpine strawberries are grown commercially for gourmet cooking. Musk strawberries spread by runners, just like their cousins you find at most nurseries, but the alpine strawberries spread by slow expansion of roots or by seeds. I’ve tried both musk and alpine and by far prefer the alpine strawberries for landscaping.
Since Alpine strawberries don’t send out runners, you can use them as edging plants, groundcovers, and so on, without worrying about them taking over and spreading into unwanted areas.
My alpine strawberries plants have been able to grow lots and lots of berries in almost full shade, with their berry producing season starting as early as May and ending as late as December. They've even been nicknamed by some as the "perpetual strawberry". Out of the 5 different kinds of strawberries I grow, my alpines beat all the others in overall berry production. I’ve found myself growing tired of picking strawberries every few days for months of time. Though, be warned, the berries are smaller, so it will take more if considering volume.
I prefer using my alpine strawberries as flavoring in things like strawberry shakes, strawberry-rhubarb pie or cobbler, or part of a berry jam. Since the flavor is stronger it takes less berries to have a good strawberry flavor. I've found that I like to wait until the berries are soft to the touch and at their maximum sweetness before picking them and either using them in some fruity wonder, or freezing them for later use.
I am really excited; since it looks like I will start getting alpine strawberries in something like a couple of weeks. My plants are loaded with blossoms and I can see berries already forming.
I’m growing both the red and white/yellow variety of alpine strawberries. I prefer the red, since I’ve found it more difficult to tell when the white/yellow variety is ripe. The white/yellow variety has a slightly sweeter almost pineapple-ish flavor to it. If you have a problem with birds eating your strawberries, you might find better luck with the white/yellow variety, since I’ve heard that birds tend to leave it alone.
Alpine strawberry plants are very hardy. The plants like humus-rich, acid soil in a sheltered site in sun or partial shade. They are hardy to zone 4. If you want more, simply divide one of the plants and plant the divisions in the locations you would like them. You will find that if you miss picking some berries that little strawberry seedlings will grow where the berries fell the following spring. It is not difficult to grow alpine strawberries from seed if you remember to freeze the seed for 3 to 4 weeks before sowing.
The alpine strawberry plant is sometimes used as an herbal medicine, via an herbal tea made from the leaves, stems, and/or flowers, which is believed to aid in the treatment of diarrhea. I haven't tried this myself, but might try experimenting with it in the future.
