Wild (about wild) Strawberries
Over the years, we’ve grown at least a dozen kinds of strawberries, mostly standard garden varieties (Fragaria x ananassa) like Sparkle and Tristar, and so-called “wild” strawberries, aka fraises de bois and alpine strawberries (F. vesca), like these Mignonettes being used as an edging in the lower garden.
Cultivated strawberries are easy to grow, almost always tasty and sometimes very tasty. But none of them - yet; I keep trying - are as good as genuinely wild strawberries (F. virginiana), the intensely flavorful, amazingly aromatic gift that grows freely in woodland edges all over the northeast and beyond.
Unfortunately, as many before me have discovered, you can bring the strawberry into the garden but you can’t bring the garden into the strawberry.
Horticultural reason suggests that selecting the plants that bear the largest quantity of the largest fruit and giving them good soil, adequate water and filtered sunshine ought to lead, gradually, to better crops than could be gathered on any summer visit to a good picking spot.
It doesn’t, no matter how many times you try. In this frustrating bit of poetic justice F. virgiania is completely democratic - anyone who bothers to pick them gets the same splendid reward: the very best strawberry in existence, in ( nothing is completely free) the very smallest package.
Clockwise from top: local garden strawberry from u-pick operation, variety unknown; true wild strawberry, from up the road; Mignonette, from the garden; Pineapple, a “white” alpine (supposedly less attractive to birds) that has gone wild in the side yard; and one of the u-pick strawberries standing in for the size of a Tristar because right now our chipmunk-in-Tristar- patch problem has reached crisis proportions.
More on Alpines: my relationship with alpines and the rarer but also much praised hautbois is one of those love/hate deals. On the plus side, they’re falling-down-easy to grow, long lived and pretty… and you get all kinds of gourmet points for having them. On the down side they take forever to pick while being far less wonderful than you’d think from all the hoopla. At least that’s how they strike me. For the opposing viewpoint - and a very large selection of seeds and plants - check out Alpine Strawberries.
Leigh Said,
July 11, 2008 @ 4:20 pm
My cousin has a variety of wild strawberry growing as a weed in a bed I put in for her last year (they predate the bed) in East Texas.
But . . . horrors . . . they have NO TASTE at all! The plant is hardy, the yield good, the berries a lovely red . . . but completely worthless.
I’ve enriched the soil a lot with organic matter . . . it was originally sugar sand . . . so I’ve been hoping they’d improve. But so far, no luck. She’d love to have something worth picking. In fact, she wouldn’t let me eradicate them at the outset. Maybe I’ll try seeds from a “real” wild strawberry next year.
leslie Said,
July 12, 2008 @ 8:47 pm
Hi Leigh,
it sounds as though your sister’s weeds might be mock strawberry, Duchesnea indica, a look-alike plant often used as a ground cover and often found covering ground to which it has not been invited. The berries aren’t poisonous, but that’s about all that can be said for them. Easiest way to tell the difference is the color of the flowers: duchesnea’s are yellow, fragaria’s are white.
But what it is matters less than what it isn’t, which is tasty enough to bother with. Rip it out and plant something else - you can tell your sister I made you do it. F. vesca seeds usually sprout easily; but it can sometimes take quite a while. Keep the seedbed weeded while waiting or start the plants in flats and transplant them after they have about 6 leaves.
In fact, flats are definitely the way to go if you’re planting the same area. The current incumbent already has plenty of seeds in that ground and you don’t want any confusion about which baby is which.
Ariana Said,
August 18, 2008 @ 8:34 am
Are Wild strawberries poisenious?
And also do they help with alergies?
What about warts?
Thank you
And may God bless You.
Ariana