![]() Her father ran the country store next to the steamboat landing, where all the island’s children bought penny candy. A descendant of French Huguenot refugees and Scots traders, my great-aunt was raised on one of the more isolated Sea Islands off the Carolina coast during the early years of the last century. ![]() Like her sister, my Nana, she was the sort of Southern woman whose hair was never out of place, carried purses clutched with military precision on her arm, and marched staccato in matching heels, even on cobbled streets in Charleston’s historic district. She was kind to a shy, disheveled adolescent who belonged neither here nor there, and lacked sweetness of other kinds in life. For these day-neutral varieties, there is no “best” time to eat them - it depends on the weather and conditions of their growth.“Gimme some sugar,” said my great-aunt Adele Anderson, who always grabbed me to her bosom and plastered red lipstick kisses on my head when I landed on her doorstep. “As long as the environmental conditions are suitable, the air temperatures are acceptable, this plant will flower and produce fruit.”Īs a result, “we’re able to produce strawberries year round in Canada - over the winter in greenhouses, and early spring to late fall in the field,” Zandstra continued. “A significant portion of (commercial strawberries) are now day-neutral strawberries,” Zandstra said. They soon bred this trait into commercial varieties, allowing producers to grow the new, “day-neutral” fruit year-round, Zandstra said. ![]() Several decades ago, researchers found a trait in the wild that allowed strawberries to flower and fruit all season. “Breeding programs have greatly enhanced the flavours and sweetness of these berries so that they approach the best attributes of the Junerbearers,” McArthur said. Other strawberries are everbearers, he continued, which produce two smaller crops in spring and fall. These varieties are called “June-bearing,” and are typically larger and have bigger yields than its peers. Traditionally, strawberries would produce a crop in June or July, with the tastiest berries “produced in a two-to-three week window mid-late June and early July,” McArthur said. When are strawberries in season in Canada? If it’s cloudy out, you won’t get as sweet a berry. That said, he reiterated the need for “enough time for optimal growth” and plenty of sunshine for photosynthesis. There are potentially hundreds of varieties of strawberries which all have distinct flavours, Zandstra said: “We likely have a dozen (varieties) available to Ontario growers, but even in North America, there’s far, far more than that.”ĭavid McArthur, a lecturer at the University of British Columbia specializing in fruit crops, added that “adequate water and mineral nutrition, good pollination, a lack of diseases and a well-timed harvest of the “ripe” berries” also factors into the final flavour. The berry’s genetics also play a major role, according to John Zandstra, a professor in fruit and vegetable cropping systems at the University of Guelph. ![]() ![]() You can tell how ripe a strawberry is by its colour, as it moves from green to white and finally to red as more sugar is stored within. “When the strawberry enlarges, it doesn’t increase in sweetness - sugar isn’t used to enlarge the fruit,” Dale noted, adding that sugars move into the berry after it grows. ![]()
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