I don’t buy supermarket strawberries. I’m usually pretty scathing about them. They’re huge and tasteless. I reckon they feed them on steroids. No natural strawberry would ever grow that big, I say, scornfully.
Er…..
It weighed in at 31 g. It appeared on a plant that was planted as a companion to a tomato. They say tomatoes like strawberries. I think it must be the other way round.
It tasted divine!
Foodnstuff 
December 30, 2013 at 3:43 am |
YUM!!! I can’t wait to get my poor long suffering strawberries into the ground but at the moment we are sanding and painting decks, deck rails and part of the house so planting out potted strawberries isn’t going to happen any day soon (its enough to drag my poor sorry derierre off to bed at the end of the day!) I love seeing companion plantings work…this one certainly did! Do you grow those small alpine strawberries? If so, are they worth growing? I am thinking about buying some seed.
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December 31, 2013 at 12:26 pm |
See Bek’s comment below. I would definitely give them a go.
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December 31, 2013 at 5:17 pm |
Cheers girls! 🙂
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December 30, 2013 at 8:34 am |
That’s a meal in itself!
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December 31, 2013 at 7:31 am |
Impressive! But as you say – huge and TASTELESS is the supermarket difference.
Narf77 – Not to put myself forward, but… I’ve grown about 20 varieties of alpine strawberry and I would say some are definitely better than others, although this may be also due to garden location and conditions. I would say they are fun to grow and experiment with, they don’t much get eaten by birds (both the red and white varieties) so don’t need to be netted which I have to do with my regular strawbs to get a crop, and they are great for picking a few during a garden meander. In fact I rarely get them inside. But I don’t think they are as tasty as they are made out to be. They are good, but not that good if you know what I mean. Hope this helps.
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December 31, 2013 at 12:25 pm |
Help! I didn’t know there were so many varieties of alpine strawberry. I’ve only grown 2—a red and a white. The white layers—puts out runners and roots madly everywhere; does yours do that? I’ve got it as an understorey in the food forest because it covers ground so quickly.
Agreed, they are great for snacks as you meander, but not agreed that they aren’t as tasty, although maybe that varies with variety. Mine taste great. The chooks love them, so not many make it inside here, either.
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December 31, 2013 at 5:49 pm |
Neither did I, until I found an American site (called the strawberry store from memory) which sells seed of a multitude of alpine, Virginian and other related strawberry varieties, like musk berries. The seeds are ok to import (no quarantine restrictions – yay!) and they grow well sometimes fruiting in their first year. I have ‘solemacher’, ‘white solemacher’, ‘Regina’, ‘Alexandria’, ‘yellow soul’, ‘yellow cream’, ‘pineapple crush’, ‘mignonette’, ‘reinette des vallees’, ‘holiday’, ‘ivory’ and ‘rodluvan’ (I had to go in the garden and find the name tags) and a white alpine from diggers which I can’t find the tags for or remember the name. None of mine, neither red nor white, send out suckers, except the musk berries (I haven’t had fruit from them yet unfortunately). I also have planted mine mostly under trees and I places where they are a bit shaded.
On the taste, I expressed myself badly. I don’t think they don’t taste as good as regular strawberries, but I’ve often heard them described as being fabulously tasty, and maybe some somewhere are, but I would say they are just as well favoured as ‘regular’ strawberries and have the novelty value of being both tiny and cute as well as coming in the white varieties.
Sorry for the over long reply. This is what happens when I start being a plant nerd.
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December 31, 2013 at 7:41 pm |
Ah well, that’s interesting because my white variety came from Diggers, too, and it suckers. The red I grew from a packet of Yates seed. I find seedlings of the red form coming up in odd places now, and just dig them up and pot them on.
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