North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Kevin Moore <aleguy33@yahoo.com>]

I live in the deep south (Z9) and can tell you that my Honoeyes begin fruiting in late February and continue through mid August. You may be right about them cooking in the sun later in the season, but I suspect the early fruit (through April) would be just fine. Since the Honoeyes are the parent stock of this berry, I assume the fruiting times would be approximately the same. The later berries are usually smaller anyway, so who cares if they cook?

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From: "dmnorton@royaloakfarmorchard.com" <dmnorton@royaloakfarmorchard.com>
To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 21, 2009 1:40:08 PM
Subject: [NAFEX] Dark Strawberry

Donna is having some posting issues with her e-mail and asked me to post this for her:

 

For a strawberry that dark, there are some other aspects besides public
interest or lack of it to keep in mind.  For starters, it would probably be
a total bust in the Deep South, because of the same problem I've seen with
purple peppers and tomatoes: they sunburn.  The intense heat of the sun on
the dark fruit literally cooks it.  On the other hand, I have looked
carefully (statistically, with pencil in hand) at the huge number of tomato
listings in my old SSE Yearbooks and found that more people in the north are
enamored of dark tomatoes.  I very much suspect that when heat units are a
limiting factor in what a plant and a fruit can do in terms of making sugars
and other flavor components, that darker fruit may be better flavored.
That's seldom hard to sell, especially with the current interest in darker
fruit for nutritive value.  Hmmm... do darker apples have better flavor way
up north?  Just musing.  Maybe it's better in apples to let the sun actually
shine through into the interior of the fruit, and opaque dark skin would
stop that.
    If this  "Black Beauty" or other variety are available from some
collection for trial, I think Jim Fruth and some other northerners might
want to trial it.  If a person were willing to fiddle with seeds that small,
they might get some interesting crosses.  I'll bet the same collection has
some commercial quality strawberries that have female only flowers, allowing
for known crosses to show up as well as selfs.  (First of all, is the color
dominant or recessive? )  Donna