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nafex - Re: [NAFEX] A rewarding little fruit...

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  • From: list@ginda.us
  • To: fuwafuwausagi@muchomail.com, North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] A rewarding little fruit...
  • Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 09:35:04 -0500


On Monday, February 17, 2003, at 03:07 AM, fuwa fuwa usagi wrote:

Gang:

Ok now on to a fruit that is delicious to eat, easy to grow, and offers so much for so little...Strawberries...

My problem with strawberries is that they are so hard to grow. More precisely, it is so hard to grow the berries to maturity because they all get eaten. I think it's the chipmunks, but who knows.

Curiously, I've had better luck with the alpines. Maybe their fruit is just less visible.

The best strawberries I've had were wild alpine strawberries picked in the alps. Bu the ambiance may have contributed to my dining experience. The next best berries I've had were Earliglows, sold in the farmers' market by the NYC World Trade Center. (I've been wondering if that's still running, or if they closed it down for good.) They were grown in upstate New York, by a merchant who grew a huge assortment of excellent fruit, all carefully brought to market. The earliglos are smaller and less red than their other varieties - certainly not the one's you'd automatically grab off the supermarket shelf. But so mach tastier.

Having despaired of fruit from my day-neutrals, I pulled them all out last year and planted earliglow. Maybe if they all ripen at once I'll get a few. If I try again, I guess I ought to try sparkle.

I grow 9 varieties of strawberries here, but for flavor nothing touches Fairfax an old 1923 cross and 1993 release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I simply have not known a better tasting strawberry. It is a bit tricky to grow, but I have found good success growing it in dappled shade, in rotting wood chips sweetened up with wood ash...they certainly are scrumptious little things...I am in the midwest outside of Chicago (in zone 4b (can you say burr)...

I wonder if the plant has died out, like the old tulips. Apropo the cloning discussion, some plants are just less long-lived than others, and can't be kept going clonallly forever. Although in the case of plants, it may have more to do with gradually acquiring too much disease load, rather than inherent mortality.

Ginda Fisher




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