My wife and I fondly remember a strawberry patch from her mother's house in the 1960's. Those plants were brought from a patch at the family farm that had been in place for many years, with the strawberry plants just rambling wildly throughout the June bearing apple orchard. The berries were small, perhaps not much bigger than a dime or a nickle diameter at most. The berries were soft and easily perishable. It took a good while to pick a quart, but what a flavor! The berries were nothing like those hard, tasteless huge commercial berries of today. All I know is that they were June bearing. They may have even come from some accidental cross. I kept a patch going through the 1980's but when we moved, neglected to bring a few pants.
So now I'm in the process of trying to find a very sweet and tasty, small June bearing variety. Dunlap and Fairfax are two old varieties that are no longer available as far as I can find out. Sparkle is available and its parents were Fairfax and Aberdeen. So I'm wondering if a person were to buy some Sparkle plants and save the seed, wouldn't some of the offspring revert back to the parents or very nearly so. Both Sparkle and Surecrop have Howard17 in their ancestry, so allowing those to cross might let some Howard17 kinds of plants emerge.
Anyway am wondering if anyone has any experience or ideas related to either obtaining heirloom strawberry plants or in letting some old varieties self cross or cross with a closs relative to perhaps get some heirloom quality offspring.
- hendi_alex
- Super Green Thumb
- Posts: 3604
- Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2008 7:58 am
- Location: Central Sand Hills South Carolina
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