After a slow start, our 2025 Strawberry patch has jumped into high gear. This Monday we picked twice as many berries as we did last Monday, and judging by the looks of the plants, I don’t expect to see much of a drop in our harvest anytime soon. Our season will end, as it always does, when we have our first real heatwave.
The Sacramento Valley is not considered a “Strawberry Region”, for many good reasons. Berries prefer spring-like weather. They are damaged by cold, rain and heat. The majority of strawberries in the state are grown just a few miles from the coast, where the ocean air keeps the temperatures mild for most of the year. In contrast, we may just have a few weeks of temperate weather here between our cold, wet Winters and our very hot summers. For us, they are a very challenging crop to grow.
That said, they can also be very rewarding, in multiple ways. There is no other crop that we can grow here in April or May that produces as prodigously as strawberries. From a relatively small field — we have 3 acres this year — we can harvest hundreds of boxes per week while the season lasts. And because we plant them in the Fall, we never have to worry about whether or not we’ll be able to get them planted as we do just about all our other spring crops. Strawberries are expensive to grow, but in a good year they can provide us with solid cash flow at a critical time of year when our expenses always exceed our income. And if the season lasts long enough — which is not that often — we can even make a profit on them.
But by far the best thing about growing strawberries is the excitement they add to our offerings. That’s because our berries almost always taste better than the ones in the store. It turns out that while coastal growing regions have many benefits, boosting the flavor of the fruit is not one of them. Our warm, sunny days are more ideal for ripening — although our berries have a shorter shelf life as a result.
We take great care to make sure the berries you get are the best quality. We only harvest during the cool of the morning, but we also can’t pick the berries when they have dew on them — so we can’t start at dawn. Sometimes that only leaves us 2-3 hours to get everything picked. But we also have nights when it doesn’t cool down as much as we would like, and the berries are already warmer than we would like first thing in the morning. For all these reasons, each and every box of harvested berries goes immediately into one of our refrigerated trucks right at the edge of the field.
A few years back, we found a new strawberry variety — Sweet Ann — that provided a big improvement in production and durability over our existing varieties while still maintaining great flavor. As a bonus, it produces giant fruit that do not shrink as the season goes on as many varieties do. This makes a huge difference in how long it takes to harvest them, as well as in the overall yield. We added Sweet Ann to our mix of varieties for a year or two before finally switching over almost entirely. We suffered a setback in 2024 when it was not available from our nursery, but this year it’s back and it is our primary variety once again.
Sweet Ann is the first strawberry we have grown that is extremely predictable, producing almost the same amount of berries per acre each day once the season gets going. Contrast this with some of the older varieties that might have double the amount of ripe fruit on a Monday than it did the previous Friday. This allows us to dial in the amount we need to plant to have enough for all of our CSA boxes as well as our other customers. And because of their large size, they take longer to ripen than some of the varieties we used to grow, which means we don’t have to harvest them every day — a critical feature given that we no longer work on weekends.
If you are interested in coming out to the farm to pick berries in person, look for an email from Eric on Friday announcing the details of our May 3rd U-Pick event. If you can’t make it, don’t worry, you’ll see plenty of berries in your boxes in the coming weeks and you can always order extra via the Webstore.
Thanks,
Pablito