These sweet delicious fruit are a perennial favourite in desserts and sweets as well as an important commercial crop in the Lower Mainland. Plants are usually inexpensive and robust, bearing a full crop within a year of establishment and spreading so vigorously via runners that your friends will often receive gifts of your divided plants.
Strawberries are wonderfully easy to grow on the West Coast so plant a large bed to yield fruit for eating fresh and for canning. They are incomparable in flavour to expensive and bland strawberries grown in California!
Garden strawberry cultivars come in three flavours:
i) Junebearers: These plants produce fruit in June or july in a single large crop within 3-4 weeks. In California and warmer climates, they produce as early as April.
This French delicacy may be the perfect little strawberry. They are bigger than most alpine strawberries, bright red, deliciously sweet, and easy to care for. The compact perennial plants form pretty little mounds that will bear strawberries the first year. Set them around the edges of the flower garden, in hanging baskets, and windowsill planters for easy picking.
