These frozen strawberries can be used in many recipes that call for fresh strawberries, from shortcake to ice cream and more.  My family has settled on a few tried and true and very easy ways to use them. One of our favorites is in a fruit  salad– this is healthful and uses a lot of fresh fruit as well. We slice up apples, bananas, oranges or clementines and any other fresh fruit we have, maybe some grapes or pineapple), thaw out some strawberries and maybe some blueberries, and mix them together. A little shredded coconut adds some sweetness and holds it all together but is optional. It disappears fast!

Another favorite is a recipe from the NC Strawberry website, “Strawberry Shortcut“.  All you need is a poundcake, some ice cream, and the strawberries. Whipped cream would be even better (but more work). It is sweeter than shortcake and the ice cream is colder than whipped cream so a bit harder to taste the flavors. But it is about as easy as it gets, always enthusiastically consumed, and the frozen strawberries work well.

The new harvest will be upon us in less than three months now.  I take on the challenge of the freezer with happy diligence, because I know that the fresh berries will trump those that are frozen– instead berries will go into the freezer again.

Expo attendees find lots of time to talk to each other.

A few weeks ago, this year’s Southeast Strawberry Expo brought together about 300 strawberry growers, research and extension folks, suppliers to the industry, and others.  Though the NC Strawberry Association is a state commodity organization, its membership and Expo attendees come from many states– among those coming the farthest were growers from Texas and Wisconsin, suppliers from California and Wisconsin, and a strawberry plant producer from Eastern Canada.  Most attendees come from North Carolina and its neighboring states, and North Carolina’s research and extension expertise in strawberries serves them all.

One of the things that makes the Strawberry Expo so special is growers’ willingness to sharetheir own  experiences and expertise with each other. During this year’s general sessions, grower speakers were featured in two “Grower Spotlight” presentations and in a panel of “100 Years of Experience”, an extraordinary confluence of thoughtful insights by five leading growers.

The Expo is an especially valuable learning opportunity for new growers. Their introduction to this supportive community is usually a “Getting Started in Strawberry Plasticulture” workshop. They come with their first plants having just been set out a few weeks ago, full of questions and mistakes already made.

A highlight of the Expo is the farm tour. This year’s tour visited three farms in Wake County: DJ’s Berry Patch, Buckwheat Farm, and Porter Farms and Nursery. If a picture is worth a thousand words, being there and talking to the owners must be worth a million. What is the market set up? How do you handle customers? How do the plants look — compared to mine or the ones at the last farm?

The group clusters to listen at Porter Farms and Nursery

How do you manage your irrigation, labor, frost protection? Or, that’s an idea I can use: the sign, the table, the parking….  Gorgeous weather and a BBQ dinner and wine tasting at Adams Vineyards added to the enjoyment of it all.

The Expo not only provides the tools to improve success in next year’s strawberry growing, it energizes and inspires its attendees for the coming year.

For readers of this blog who aren’t familiar with strawberry production here’s a brief explanation of planting:  Before planting, growers work up their soil and create their raised beds, which are covered with black plastic and have a line of drip irrigation tape running down the bed under the plastic. This year, as always, weather was a factor: is it too dry to make the beds or too wet to get into the field… or maybe one and then the other.

The plants are in two general types, plugs (similar to the packs of annual flowers and tomatoes everyone buys, but in trays of 50) and bare root fresh-dugs. The pictures show a couple of plugs and a bundle of bare root plants.

Bare root plants are set by hand by workers walking down the rows  — it is pretty backbreaking work. Folks setting out plugs usually use a machine slowly pulled behind a tractor that lets riders drop the plugs into holes in in the plastic, and then puts water into each hole.  All plants need to be irrigated conscientiously until they are well established. The picture below shows a planter in the field with a crew setting out plugs.

Here on a home garden scale, I’ve been doing the same thing, but only 1oo plants, and no machines to lay plastic or set plants. The young plants have been enjoying this fall’s cool weather, and now some gentle rains. So far, so good!  We have a ways to go together.

You can see in the photo how small the berries are, and the way the seeds are deeply indented. Small fruit breeder Jim Ballington of NC State University says that these sunken seeds are characteristic of the native eastern wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana).

This native strawberry is one of the parents of the cultivated strawberry. The Digital Botanic Garden gives a good concise explanation: The cultivated strawberry is “an accidental hybrid between F. chiloensis, which grows along the western seaboard of North and South America as far south as Chile, and F. virginiana which is a woodland species mostly found in eastern North America. Both were eaten by indigenous peoples there before they were brought to Europe in the mid-16th. century, where they were cultivated separately. Their fruits were larger than native European species which made them desirable, but the key event in modern strawberry history was a chance cross-pollination between these two species when they were grown together in France. The offspring was the even larger fruited F. x ananassa, originally known as the pineapple or pine
strawberry and first described in 1759. Modern strawberries are descendants of
this original cross, probably performed by a bee.”

Dr. Ballington notes that some of what we find in the wild are escapees of cultivated berries or hybrids of cultivated and wild strawberries. These wild (and gone wild) strawberries are not simply food for human foragers and wild animals, they are also a reservoir of strawberry genetics. Between 1995 and 1998, with funding from USDA, he made trips through the Southeastern states collecting wild plant material, looking for disease resistant genetics that could be introduced into breeding programs.

Wild strawberries grow all over. In June, hiking below Mt. St. Helens in Washington state, I found wild strawberries growing in an area that had been swept bare when torrents of mud and rock raced down the valleys when the
volcano erupted in 1980. This floodplain is now pocked by small ponds and hummocks of volcanic gravel and strawberries are among the plants now colonizing this odd new landscape.  More power to them!

The last of the strawberries.

Last week was the last strawberry harvest in my garden; but how sweet and wonderful those last few pickings were. (If farms in your area are still harvesting, be sure to catch those final and very fine berries!)  Late season berries are smaller and they even look different: they are rounder, the seeds stand out on the surface instead of being sunken in, and the calyx (the green leaves at the top of the berry) is smaller. The flavor of those final few berries was intense, quintessential strawberry, steeped over these long sunny days.  

Many farms — though not all — have also wrapped it up.  Time now to pull up the plastic and get ready for next year, or to pull up the plants and set out melons or pumpkins in their place. Time to take a vacation or clean up the clutter that accumulated while you were too busy to think. And then time to buy plants for next year and get ready to plant again this fall.

Time also to eat blueberries and cherries and peaches instead or start pulling strawberries out of the freezer — I’ve got some whipped cream begging to be shortcaked. Or perhaps head north where strawberry season is just beginning?

I’d dried apples and pears before, and this week I borrowed the neighborhood’s shared food drier and gave it a try, slicing the berries about 1/4 inch thick. Here’s what they looked like when they first went onto the trays. I set the drier out on the porch, plugged it in, and let it go to work. It took about 16-20 hours for them to dry; it would probably be less if the weather had been warmer and less humid.

Here’s what they look like after they dried. You can see they have shrunk, but not how thin the slices are – like pennies — and how crisp; I had to chip them gently from the racks. They are sweet, chewy morsels of concentrated strawberry flavor, with a bit of seedy crunch. I now have a pint container that contains maybe 6-8 quarts of fresh strawberries.

I am not sure what I will do with them yet, mostly they are great to nibble on. With a college student coming home soon who would just as soon spend his snack money on dried cherries and mango as on Skittles, and remembering my experience with the dried apples and pears, I have a feeling I know where most of them will go. I either need to hide some or dry a lot more. Luckily, there are still plenty of strawberries out there!

Strawberries are amazing. Especially if you haven’t seen one before. This child, one of many visiting Page Farms of Raleigh, is taking a very close look.

“The redder they are, the better they are.” This is how the Pages teach visiting kids how to pick strawberries. Well, yes, I knew that, but I didn’t know such a snappy way to say it. In my garden, I am always weighing a choice, “Should I pick it now when it looks pretty good or wait, and chance that it will get overripe or a squirrel will find it?” I think I tend to pick them just a day early, and it is too easy to keep ahead of them… but at the farms, they were plenty that were fully and perfectly ripe. 

There’s more than one good way to pick a strawberry. I always pinch the stem with my fingernails, or stretch the stem between my fingers and break it (hard to explain). Danny Page says “twist the stem and then pull.” I’m trying it out.

Their strawberries taste better than mine. Maybe it’s just they’re riper, but I now have even greater respect for how strawberry farmers care for their berries.  Grower Trey Early, in Gibsonville, says I’ve probably been putting too much nitrogen on. His berries were fantastic.

It doesn’t need to be a bright sunny day to go pick strawberries.  

I visited Harold Apple’s Farm in Gibsonville late on a Friday afternoon. It was grey, quiet, almost misty, and one of the most beautiful farms I’ve been on.  It was grace just to be there.

Hardly anyone was picking that afternoon, they hadn’t discovered the secret. Or had been scared by the chance of rain. Or thought they’d wait until Saturday when everyone else would be there. They missed a treat.

My mother was a walker, a birdwatcher, a good cook, and a curious and adventurous person. When I was in my early teens, my family bought an old cabin near the Appalachian Trail as a weekend place, and we became gardeners, gatherers of wild foods (including strawberries), and customers of the local farms.  ”The cabin” became the family’s center and homeplace.  For me, this eventually turned into working with agriculture all my life, all my brothers like to cook and care about good food, and one of them and his family, now lives at the cabin.

There are no strawberry farms in my experiences with my mother, but last time she came to visit before she died, she and I and my two sons, a three-year-old and a newborn, went to get pumpkins at the local pumpkin farm. Here’s a picture.

And now, here is the older of those two boys, just out of college, picking strawberries on a farm in Pennsylvania last summer.  I felt like a successful mother when I heard. He, too, now likes to cook…  And his younger brother devours fruit with astonishing enthusiasm. They are both computer- and math-oriented young men, but they have grown up in the country, surrounded by trees and gardens, and I like to think that maybe some of this grandmother they never knew will have come through in them.

This strawberry garden started as a project by teacher Megan Sedeghat and Gina Fernandez, the parent of one of her students, who also happens to be a small fruit researcher at NC State University. It was the first of what is now quite a number of schools around the state growing strawberries as part of the Schoolyard Strawberry Project.  

Strawberries fit really well into the school year, because the school can use the same annual hill system that North Carolina’s farmers use, planting in the fall and harvesting in the spring, a full crop in one school year. It is impressive to see how a good teacher like Ms. Sedeghat works so many “course of study” activities into the garden… all that measuring!   They see how plants grow, see the flowers develop into fruit, and  learn something about nutritious food choices and NC’s agriculture. And did I mention eat a few strawberries?

It's harvest time!

Yesterday was the first of May, May Day, and the start of “Strawberry Month” in North Carolina. I thought I’d quote just a bit of the text from Governor Perdue, but she really makes many important points about North Carolina strawberries, so here’s the entire proclamation:

“WHEREAS, the North Carolina strawberry is a sweet, aromatic, succulent berry, and the first sign of warm weather fruits; and

WHEREAS, the strawberry industry is an important part of the agribusiness industry in North Carolina; and

WHEREAS, according to the 2010 Agricultural Statistics from the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, North Carolina’s strawberry industry accounts for approximately $20.4 million in farm income; and

WHEREAS, according to the 2010 Agricultural Statistics from the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, North Carolina ranks third in the nation in fresh market strawberry production with approximately 1,500 acres of strawberries harvested by farm families in almost every county of the State; and

WHEREAS, the strawberry industry is part of the diversification practices by many of North Carolina’s full-time farmers; the industry also provides employment for many of our State’s citizens and provides supplemental income for a number of rural families who farm on a part-time basis; and

WHEREAS, technology pioneered on North Carolina farms has allowed our strawberry fields to serve as resources for growers from other states who come to learn the plasticulture method of growing fruits and vegetables; and

WHEREAS, North Carolina is recognized as a leader in strawberry research and production in the Southeast; and

WHEREAS, through the cooperation of strawberry producers, the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the North Carolina Agricultural Cooperative Extension Service, “pick your own” farms, roadside markets and traditional farm-to-market operations, the strawberry industry is flourishing across the State;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BEVERLY EAVES PERDUE, Governor of the State of North Carolina, do hereby proclaim May 2011, as “STRAWBERRY MONTH” in North Carolina and urge our citizens to support the industry.