It’s not a wolfberry, it’s . . .
The Berry-Naming Subcommittee quickly dispensed with the first three items on the agenda by agreeing on names for blackberry, blueberry and gooseberry, all obvious choices. Controversy arose, however, for number four. Some favored wolfberry for no good reason. One fiery troublemaker insisted on naming it Elizabethberry after her third granddaughter. The shire reave pointed out they were red berries so why not call them redberries, but the group thought that was silly.
At this point, Iver Scroggins slowly stood and ambled to the front of the room. Quiet prevailed. “These same berries at my farm ripen when my straw is ready to cut,” he observed. “They send runners out like blades of straw. My grandchirren spike them with a piece of straw to vend at market. On my land, we call them strawberries.”
Nobody argued with Iver Scroggins, and his suggestion still stands today except in France where they are called fraise, in Germany they are erdbeere, and so on in other countries.
Almost two billion pounds (!) of strawberries are harvested annually just in California with another billion or so in the rest of the United States. We really like our strawberries, and consumption has more than doubled in the past 50 years.
Strawberries grow wild the world over, but they have not always been considered special. Famous Roman and Greek authors hardly mentioned strawberries in their writings, but by the 14th century Europeans were transplanting wild varieties from the woods into their home gardens. These would have had small fruit, and some would have been yellow.
Around this time, King Charles V had his gardener plant 1200 strawberry plants in the Louvre gardens. Three centuries later during the time of the French Revolution, it was the habit of famous flirty-pants socialite Madame Tallien to bathe in the juice of 22 pounds of strawberries, but history indicates she did not bathe every day… probably because she had to find more strawberries.
When European immigrants first encountered Native Americans, the locals were already eating wild strawberries. The newcomers did not bother to cultivate strawberries because they were plentiful in forests. The immigrants sent back home the Virginia strawberry, and eventually it grew in the same gardens as a much larger variety from Chile. French gardeners crossed these two to create the ancestor of modern strawberries.
All modern cultivars fall into three categories: June-bearing, everbearing or day-neutral. June bearers produce their entire crop within a month. Everbearing cultivars produce a spring crop and another in autumn, and day-neutrals produce all summer and beyond as long as the temperatures stay 40-90°. However, day-neutral cultivars are grown as annuals, which means they produce fruit the first year but a gardener would plant new plants every year. My ever-bearing plants have withstood Ozark winters and produced again when the weather warmed up.
Almost always, gardeners start strawberries from transplants. I started yellow strawberry plants, an alpine variety, from seeds years ago. The fruit was almost white, smaller but tasty, and the plants did not send out runners like the strawberry cultivars we usually grow, so they would be ideal in pots on a patio.
Regarding strawberry runners… if a gardener wants to start new plants, then let them run. You can transplant the new starts to a new bed and repeat until you have more strawberry plants than Charles Number Five. If you prefer more fruit from the plant, however, snip the runners.
Strawberry plants prefer slightly acidic soil, so pine straw mulch is your best pal. A dose of aged manure is also handy because strawberries like nitrogen.
Important to know: rubbing a strawberry slice on your skin will relieve sunburn, and that is why Madame Tallien skinny-dipped all over France with nary a care. I’m just guessing, but maybe.