The Price of Fresh Strawberries

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By early spring, you want. ..no, by God, you need a bowl of fresh strawberries cut up into small pieces with a light sprinkling of sugar. And just this once, aroint the cholesterol, you want those suckers smothered in cream. Maybe a few bananas slices, too. And some blueberries...

Sure, you could go to the supermarket and buy some out-of-season cardboard pink fruitoids, partly ripened; but they wouldn't be real strawberries.

All right. Patience is a virtue. You can wait until they return again in the straw berry beds of the garden—they're perennials, aren't they?

For several years, our backyard has erupted in a bloody riot of strawberries, and one would assume these hardy perennials would be good for yet another season. But it's not that simple; gardens have rules of their own. Upon investigation—meaning when I ask my wife, joy, the master gardener and chief horticulturalist on our little acreage—I find that many of our old runner plants are somehow all used up or have reverted to outlaw. We will need new plants, apparently.

In gardening, the most obvious facts do not necessarily mean anything. An obvious fact: Strawberries are studded with thousands of visible seeds. "So" I ask her, "can we just grow some new strawberry, uh, cultivars from seeds?"

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.

- Zen Proverb

Joy looks up in surprise from the seed catalog; sometimes she forgets that I'm a nongardener. "It might be possible," she patiently explains, "but it would be like whittling toothpicks out of boards when you can buy 500 of them for a buck:" Fair enough. We won't be cutting up strawberries and planting the eyes like seed potatoes. Instead, we'll buy new strawberry plants from a nursery. Joy has heard good things about Tri-Star, which I gather is some kind of semiperpetual strawberry that thrives in the Northwest. "That one's a day-neutral," Joy says. A question mark forms above my head.

Wishing to fill some of the knowledge gap between us, I ask for a quick summary of strawberry knowledge, something I can absorb and retain without dozing off from sheer boredom. At this point, Joy fills my arms with strawberry literature, saying something about how study is half the work of gardening, knowledge always precedes action, etc. After hours of diligent research, I learn the following:

"Strawberries are one of the easiest berries for the amateur to cultivate, provided you're willing to sweat a bit," Joy tells me as she hands over a seed packet. "You have to start with certified, disease-free plants from the three types: Everbearers, day-neutrals, and Junebearers:" After a few moments of explanation, those long-elusive terms become clearer to me. Everbearers produce two crops, in midsummer and early fall; day-neutrals produce through the growing season; and June-bearers produce only one stupendous crop (take a wild guess when.) You'll need to pinch off the first flowers of everbearers and day-neutrals so they don't use up their strength before they're established, and be careful not to let the June-bearers bear fruit at all in the first year.

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