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  • From: road's end farm <organic101 AT linkny.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] strawberry flavor
  • Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 09:33:14 -0500


On Feb 15, 2005, at 6:37 AM, Graeme Gerrard wrote:

Well, isn't the world complex. Sweet Charlies grown north of here have a really reputation as being great tasting fruit. We were very keen to grow them. The runners were hard to get too. It was one of the varieties we dug out after the season because they just didn't taste any good!
I guess it is a case of horses for courses. Someone once said that a variety that did well at one farm wouldn't necessarily be the same on a farm only 2 kms away.
Graeme


Yes, you pretty much have to try everything on your own place. Other people's suggestions are a good place to start, but with strawberries or anything else, not everybody gets the same results

This might lend credence to the theory that it's partly fertilizer; as people using the same management get different results on different soils, it would make sense that different nutrient availability would be part of the issue; though some of it is presumably soil textures, and microclimate. I've also had berries of generally good-flavored varieties turn bitter in an odd weather year (do we have any other kind of year lately?) although there were clear varietal differences, I had about six varieties in the field that year (small field) and some of them didn't do it.

In the Northeast USA, if your primary issue is flavor, the first thing to try is Sparkle. This is not a shipping berry at all, and runs small, but you can get it to farmers' market; when my customers ask for a strawberry by name, it's usually Sparkle that they ask for. Sparkle is fairly late season; Earliglow is close in flavor, and quite early; Earliglow is also not at all a shipper, and size drops off rapidly after the first couple of pickings. I grow Jewel for midseason; it's the best flavored of the larger berries I've tried; still not as large as those monsters I've seen in the supermarket lately, but definitely worth eating for both taste and texture.

And then there's a further complication with flavor. A couple of years ago I trialed some Cavendish, partly because I'd been told it was relatively drought resistant. (At that point the drought went away for a while, so I can't speak to that one yet.) Nice big berries and prolific; but I thought it was bland; so did people working here. I wasn't going to plant it again -- but -- some of my customers loved it. Others would buy it only if I had nothing else. I might put this down to the possibility that the Cavendish customers had tasted nothing else except a supermarket berry (they were definitely better than that); except that I've noticed that, if I hand out taste samples of four different berries to four different people, half the time I get four different relative rankings.

-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale





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