Little Strawberries
By Sharon Parker
(First published in The Observer e-mail edition, January 6, 2003; revised January 17, 2006.)
I was sitting at the coffee shop thumbing through my Jung’s Quality Seeds when a woman who had been there nearly as long as I had got up to leave and spotted me looking at the catalog. “Planning your garden?” she asked. I said I was only looking at the catalog at this point, feeling no urgency to actually start planning anything.
“What do you grow?” she asked. I said something vague, not sure how much of an answer she was looking for. “Do you grow fruit? Strawberries?” she offered, adding, “I used to have those little strawberries.” Ah, now I knew the strawberries she meant, sometimes called by the elegant name fraise du bois (French for “strawberries of the woods”), or, more often these days, alpine strawberries (suggesting that they grow on mountains); known to horticulturists as Fragaria vesca, and closely related to the wild strawberry, Fragaria virginiana.
Whatever their origins, these pretty little plants are well-suited to growing in your garden -- they are “sweet” not only in flavor but also appearance and temperament. Their fruit is small and very flavorful, and they tend to ripen a little at a time, so you need several plants if you want enough for a bowl of cereal on any given morning.
They form little bushy plants about 10 inches tall, with few runners, so they won’t invade their neighbors and thus can be used in a mixed flower-herb-and-food garden. They’ll be happy in part sun and make a lovely ground cover in semi-shady areas, though they’ll bear more fruit in full sun. Being nearly wild, they don’t require any of the fuss that cultivated strawberries demand--a little top dressing with compost and manure in late spring and again in mid to late summer should keep them happy.
You may need to allow a few of them to go to seed, or reseed them yourself in the fall every few years, in order to continue getting strawberries. If you hope to get fruit from them, you’ll need to keep them well-watered, but if you grow them as an ornamental, they are somewhat drought tolerant.
I planted a few alpine strawberries in my old garden the summer that we moved here, so I didn’t get to enjoy the harvest. I had gotten those from a fellow gardener I knew only through mutual gardening activities (we both volunteered at the Lake Harriet rock garden several years ago; for all I know she still does). I was out for a bike ride and made a point of going down her street to admire her garden when I found her out working in it. We chatted awhile, and she ended up digging up some of her alpine strawberry plants and giving them to me.
So now that my coffee-shop acquaintance has reminded me of them, I find myself wanting to grow those little strawberries again.
The seeds are available from Pinetree Garden Seeds (www.superseeds.com/vegr-s.htm), and from Nichols (www.nicholsgardennursery.com). Several sources recommend that the seeds be cold-treated before planting (which means putting them in the freezer in an air-tight bag for 2 to 4 weeks), and then started 8 to 10 weeks before transplanting outdoors, so I see that I may need to put together my seed order soon to allow enough time to get them going. That means hurrying up and making my plans now so I know what else I want to order. All because of a casual comment from a passing gardener.
