North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[list@ginda.us]

On May 28, 2005, at 8:13 AM, growyourown@earthlink.net wrote:

>   This question has come to me second or third hand. Here are the 
> details. These folks have a strawberry patch. Some of the berries look 
> fine but smell very bad and taste terrible.  Thats all I know. I have 
> picked hundreds of quarts and dont really ever recall this particular 
> problem.

No idea

>    By the way, it has been an incredible strawberry year here in SW 
> ohio. For me anyway. Flavorful and sweet. Timely rains, cool weather 
> and long harvest. Still picking the earliest varieties.

I have a new strawberry problem this year.  My previously care-free 
alpine strawberries are covered with a new (to me, and to them) 
caterpillar, which is eating the leaves but leaving the stems and 
fruiting parts.  The caterpillar is pretty well camouflaged, and I 
noticed it because the fruits were so much more visible than in the 
past.  They are about 1/2 inch long with a green body covered with 
white fuzz that looks very similar to the fuzz on the stems of the 
strawberries.  They mostly hang out on the underside of leaves.  I 
spent a lot of time last night picking them off the plants and crushing 
them.

Without the leaves to hide in, I'm afraid the alpines will fall prey to 
the same critters that make it impossible for me to harvest ordinary 
strawberries.  Sigh.  (Lots of June-bearing plants, lots of flowers, 
lots of little green berries, many big white berries, maybe 3 red 
berries over the season. . .  An increase over the zero red berries I 
had pre-cat.)

Ginda
zone 6, eastern Mass, where all of May has been April, and it hasn't 
warmed up yet.