Welcome to Terra Firma’s Fall Strawberry season! We plant strawberries once every year, around Labor Day. 99.9% of the production from that Berry patch will be harvested the following spring, starting sometime between April Fools Day and Tax Day. The other 0.1% of the berries are in the Medium and Large boxes today.
Why is the Fall berry season so short? Do the Berries stop producing? Not exactly. As long as there are sunny days and temperatures above 50 or so degrees, the plants will keep flowering and the flowers will pollinate. If it stays warm enough, the berries will grow and possibly even ripen. I have found and eaten tasty strawberries in our field as late as the week after Thanksgiving.
But a number of factors conspire to ensure that we won’t be able to put them in your CSA boxes more than once or twice. Rain is one: berries that sit in water for more than an hour or so will turn soft and rot. We cover the soil in our Berry patch with plastic mulch that keeps them from getting muddy, but it also collects water. While we do sometimes get rain in October, it is usually light and followed by warm, sunny days that quickly evaporate the moisture. Once we get into November, even a heavy dew will take so long to dry that the berries can turn soft.
Cold is also a factor. We generally get our first frost around Halloween. A strawberry that has been exposed to a frost or freeze is a… frozen strawberry. They are still tasty but you can’t exactly pack them into a berry basket and put them in a CSA box. Freezing temperatures also deform immature berries, causing a distorted shape and uneven ripening. After a week or so of cold, wet weather, the Berry plants go dormant for the winter. They “wake up” again sometime in February or March and grow quickly, getting big quickly.
During spring, Berry harvest is slow as the plants are loaded with dozens of flowers and multiple ripe fruit at a time. But this time of year they are tiny, with just a handful of leaves and a few fruit per plant. Harvesting is pretty quick — there’s no hunting in the leaves for the perfectly red ones. You can see them from 5 feet away. Yesterday we were getting one flat from each bed in the field, a fraction of the amount we would harvest in spring. Six people were able to pick the entire field, and we got just barely enough berries to put a basket in all the Medium and Large boxes.
There are still green berries in the field. If we are able to harvest again next week, those berries will get shared with the Small boxes. But there is rain in the forecast: our first real storm of the season will move in Friday night and may soak the berries. There is also a chance for frost this week; this morning we had a close call with temperatures dipping to 36 degrees.
If the weather turns warmer and drier for a spell after the storm, there is still a chance that we might be able to pick the berries one more time. But the later it gets into November, the lower the odds get. My gut feeling is that our Fall Berry Season will end up being a single week this year.