What do strawberries taste like?

How are you going to "transplant" them? Do you know how strawberries propagate?

When they become content and tractable in their new environment, I suppose.

Or maybe when they agree to taste like they were told

OK, actually, that's a trick question. If you buy strawberry sets to plant your own, you are getting "seedlings," plants which have been started and put in s small container of dirt for you to transplant. You might be able to dig up wild strawberries and rush them home to set out, but i'll bet that you'll lose 19 out of 20 plants. Alternatively, you could pick the berries and put them into tiny posts of soil--although i doubt that you'd enjoy any more success with that method. People who routinely grow strawberries start out with strawberry sets, and then carefully cultivate them over time. The strawberries my grandparents had had been going for 30 years and more.

That's because the other way that strawberries propagate (other than from the seeds) is with runners:



See the runners coming off the plant to the left? My grandmother would cut the runners off one side of the strawberry patch, and leave them on the other, and the strawberry patch would gradually move down the garden. When she reached the far end, she'd reverse the process. That allowed nitroben-fixers like beans to "beef-up" the soil before the strawberries came back through. It also allowed her to fertilize the soil, and add sand to it, on the side into which the strawberry runners were heading.

I sincerely doubt the that anyone ever grew "wild strawberries." Did someone at a nursery sell them a line of BS?

It's called manure, not BS.

If it were my project, I would use the sprouts from the runners. The young ones are easier to domesticate.

We used compost. Are you saying that you or someone you know transplanted runners from wild strawberries, and enjoyed a reasonable success? We picked wild strawberries in the woods, and (when we didn't just eat them outright) we added them to the strawberries that we grew. Although tart, and not very sweet, they had a lot of strawberry flavor. As for the tartness, there is such a thing sa sugar.

You're being too literal.

"Wild Strawberries" also refers to the cultivar or type of strawberry plant (fragaria vesca) as well as habitat. They are a type of Alpine strawberry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragaria_vesca

I bought mine, which were sold as fraises des bois, at my garden center, and grew them in a pot. At the same time, I also had a small patch of regular strawberry plants growing in the ground. Both were delicious, although very different, but the "wild" ones were considerably less hardy and the tiny fruit had to be eaten immediately upon riping.

Ever see the Ingmar Bergman movie, "Wild Strawberries"? Great film.

The leaves on those wild strawberries looks like tropical plant leaves.

I wasn't clear, I see. The ones without the worms tasted good.

I'm with ya. The idea that someone can trademark Wild Strawberries is bizarre. Along the lines of gene patents in the U.S.

Wild strawberries don't grow in a garden.

Full stop.

To me it would have been far preferable that the purveyors used the correct latin name instead of calling them Wild Strawberries with a trademark, which is goofily confusing. I get it, though. Latin names put people off, and they wanted buyers to know the plants were not the usual garden strawberries.

Who says they are trademarked as "wild strawberries"? Where did you get that idea?

It's a descriptive term of a type of strawberry plant, not specifically of it's "wild" habitat, although it does propagate freely in some areas. The same type of plant is also known by other names--Alpine strawberry, fraises des bois, etc.

They do if you cultivate them in your garden.

People also grow "wild flowers" in gardens as well.

I'll disagree with pretty much all of that.


edit : skip the "pretty much"

weve been growing and using the "Woodlnd strwberries" (alpine strawberrie and "wild strawberries ' are other varietals)
The wild strawberries dont send out clones (runners0 and must be indiividually propogated from asexueal means (We divide a plant into at least 4 each three year period)
Most strawberrie (cultured) varietals crap out after three years and must be renewed by favoring several of the clones. Doing runners every year actually saps the strength from the main function of producing the fruit (Which is not a berry at all)
We actually prefer the flavor of the woodlands ause they tend to be much sweeter (though they are awfully small)

Q watermelon is a berry and so is a tomato

They are like blueberries in that they are grown as " wild' and have been further propogated and improved for size so that they can be grown in field plots. Most blueberries we see in markets though are "Highbush types" which arent really blueberries at all.

My statement disowning highbush blueberries wasnt a biological statements so much as it was one of preference. Highbush berries, to me, have a taste that is sweet but not nearly as intense as the barren grown wild varieties mostly grown in Quebec, Nova SCotia,New Brunswick nd Maine. These varietie account for more than 70% of "pie berries" sold in the market. We have a New Jersey Highbush that is kinda watery tasting to me and, by virtue of the natural dyes it contains, a stain on your ahirt can be removed with a bit of water. The lowbush berries,should some spill off your fork, could ruin a shirt for good.

The comparison was mostly about the different "Wild v tame" strawberry and blueberry varieties.


Commercial "Wild" strawberries are grown on farms in plots devoted to them (they are more of a specialty than a money crop. The big commercial grown "humongous" strawberries are almost devoid of taste.
People who buy California berries in the winter should know that their berries were picked pink and bright green two days ago and ripened in a boxcar in a long "lettuce train" using a forced atmosphere of ethylene gas. Strawberry farmers of the Juaquin Valley are not payed for flavor of their product, but wet weight.
So when you complain that your strawberries taste almost as good as the box they came in, youve been hosted to the tricks of modern monoculture ag.

Well, that might explain why I always thought blueberry pie was pretty, but kind of insipid.

you make a blueberry pie out of a lowbush "wild" berry, the flavor is so intense with "blueberriness"

My grandmother put out her strawberry sets in the early 1920s. We were getting good fruit from them, still, in the early 1960s. How you manage the runners must make a difference. She snipped off any runners which weren't going where she wanted them to go. In early spring, we would dig into the compost heap (and steam would pour out of it--the stuff was "working" all winter) and dig that into the soil on the side of the strawberry patch where the runners were allowed to go, along with sand. Good fruit. We also picked wild strawberries (honest to Dog wild strawberries) in the woods and what didn't get eaten in the picking went into the strawberry preserves she made.

Thats pretty much what the growers do but theysqueeze two strait years of production for each bed. Nowadays most commercial growers have this wide plastic sheeting with holes into which the growers will only allow so many runners. All the rest are snipped off.
Talk about your monoculture. In California there are miles and miles of just strawberries,
Around here we have a few "pick your own" strawberry farms that will do the runner propogation year after year for about 5 years and then plow the whole thing under and move the strawberry beds somewhere else. In the last year of production for that field, they will snip clones off the plants and stuff them into a water base propogation solution till the plants send roots, then they replant them. They will also introduce new cultivars that are now becoming common. The pick your own farms have a benefit to be able to change their varietals more quickly . The availability of new better tasting varieties are always out there. The newest is an "everbearing" variety which is able to produce larger sweet berries all during the 3 month bearing season. It will be a home garden hit because the old everbearing kinds used to die off after only two years or so and you always needed to have two or more parralel fileds or patches;