Preliminary Thoughts on 2007 Trials
(written in late October 2007)
Most of the research for 2007 has been completed.
Most of the plants in the ground bed stopped producing
when it got hot in the summer and are struggling to survive.
Some are coming back with the cooler weather but there
is little or no production from them this fall (this is
being written in early October 2007).
Plants in containers tended to do better
this year than those planted in the ground bed. Location
may have had something to do with that. The ground bed
gets full sun from early morning until early afternoon
and gets quite hot. Soaker hoses are used for watering
except when fertilizer is applied with a sprinkler can.
This is one aspect of alpine strawberry production that
needs to be looked at. Once planted, ground beds cannot
be moved. When containerized plants get a little crowded
they are easily moved. In addition, I use primarily white
containers for that production and I feel strongly that
pot color plays an important role in production and length
of season. Another study needed!!
Production trials were very interesting.
I have not yet begun the task of summarizing the data
collected. It's a massive amount of information. Most
data was entered into a spreadsheet which should help
make it easier to summarize. I'll need to find someone
with a statistical analysis program to do the analysis
but I hope to have a general summary completed soon.
After a lot of fruit loss and trouble due
to birds, I think I've finally decided to limit production
of red varieties. I frantically put up bird netting in
the spring after losing quite a few fruit. Many red fruit
had one peck taken out of them, thus ruining the whole
fruit. Granted, they are not that large but the taste
is so wonderful that one gets angry when even a few fruit
are lost. I'm leaning strongly toward producing yellow
and white varieties only. In fact, I found a couple of
garden varieties of white berries and will be testing
them next year in addition to the musk strawberries. I
know, they're not the same species and they runner. I
did grow them years ago and the runners kind of made me
a little crazy - a little like what I wrote above for
'Mara'. But, we soon forget and need to be reminded. We'll
see how long I can stay interested in the musk strawberries.
Variety production trials are in the planning
stages for next season. I already have 8 varieties with
4 pots for each variety planted for a replicated trial.
The plants should be well established by the time it gets
cold. It will be a lot of picking and weighing, but I'm
looking forward to getting more and better data.
I spoke to a fruit buyer who is VERY interested
in buying fraises des bois for the restaurant trade. I'm
seriously considering going into production, but the pieces
just haven't come together yet. There is a demand and
there isn't much competition. We'll see.
I hope to post some more information yet this
fall. I likely will not post final data here. I plan to
summarize the data and submit an article to a magazine.
We'll see how that goes.
