Sweet (Alpine) Strawberry
Regular strawberries are nice, but sadly we neither eat enough of it, nor have the patience to really protect it from all the creatures that want to devour it. The fruit sizes are varied, some years giving large ones, other years giving rise to strangely shaped and stumpy ones. The only person in our family who is excited to see strawberries regardless of how useful it actually is, is our almost-4 daughter who is delighted when she finds one ready for picking.
That’s not to say I don’t have any regular strawberries on the property–I do, but I don’t protect them nor really pay much attention to them. They’re the leftovers from past years when I thought we’d really get a good crop of it going and I don’t have the heart to kill them. They’re not suitable to my food forest style gardening, where vigor and utility reigns supreme.
Now, the alpine strawberries (Fragraria vesca), of which I have both red and white varieties of–these are the strawberries I can get behind. They are small, maximum size reaching the fingertip joint of my thumb, but they are a burst of flavor in tiny packaging. Very sweet, and very fragrant–when you bite into one, you go, “this. this is the flavor of strawberries.”
They are also vigorous, sending runners every which way, forming a dense groundcover even on poor soil. They don’t compete as well, but it doesn’t matter if you have them in an area where not much else will grow. The foliage and flowers are attractive, thriving even in full shade (as I have a large patch under an awning on the north side of the house, where everything else has died due to a lack of sun.)
They seem to be drought resistant, although they obviously do better with more water. I suppose my only issue with them is their lack of sizeable fruits, which makes them only good for munching in the garden while we work. But they propagate easily, and from an original three plants, I have now hundreds. They are obviously winter hardy, surviving just fine here in NY.
There are both white and red varieties, which the only difference is honestly whether or not birds bother it. Ants love the ones they can reach, while slugs in general seem to leave it alone (although I suppose I wouldn’t know, considering a large slug could make short work of one in a matter of a few minutes.)
One thing to be aware of is that they won’t put their energy into fruits if they’re constantly sending runners around (which they seem to love to do), so if you want them to give more and larger fruit, you should nip the runners. Of course, if you’re like me, enjoying the fact that they’re overtaking an area where nothing else will grow, you might just leave them to run how they may.
