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I am overwintering some White Soul Alpine strawberries in the Garage V8 nursery. I like doing this because they don’t go all the way dormant and bloom and fruit sporadically during the winter.

In the fall, I bought one plant of Elan F1 with intension to propagate runners. And while it has not grown any runners yet, when it opened its first blossom, I tried pollinating with pollen from the White Soul blossoms that were available just so it would set fruit. At the time, I effectively CROSS pollinated the open White Soul blossoms with Elan as well. I have continued to cross pollinate two more Elan blossoms with White Soul’s.

Well, that blossom did set fruit, but has been growing this giant ugly-looking fruit, and THOSE new ones are also looking odd. Elan F1 is supposed to bear red conical fruits — these look like over-grown pink Alpines.

AND the White Soul berries are starting to develop into rounded fruits with red seeds!

Only explanation I can think of is that Crossed traits might show up on strawberries right away rather than not being obvious until offspring of the fruit seeds — maybe because their seeds are on the outside? I’m thinking of corn as an example of fruits that show crossed traits immediately.

I really don’t know how to explain these (especially the Elan fruits). These White Soul has always had green to white seeds I think. the shape tends to be more elongated than these as well, though I did find a photo when some of them had been somewhat similarly rounded (but even these have the elongated point I think?) — There are a couple of typical WS fruits in a bucket of strawberries, and I see in earlier posts that I had harvested some white with red seeds unexpectedly, as well as some oddly pink fruits ...and those could have come from mixed bed with WS plants.



Subject: Fruit Harvest from season to season
May 27, 2016

applestar wrote:Re-cap strawberries so far.

Subject: Fruit Harvest from season to season
May 31, 2018

applestar wrote:Daily strawberry harvest for the past week (strawberries are floating in 2 gallon bucket of water)

— I won’t intentionally cross pollinate any more Elan blossoms and see what happens ... but the ladybugs have been in the strawberry blossoms and mating (as I understand it, they need to eat pollen for the minerals, protein, nutrients, etc. to be able to mate) so I may not be able to keep them pure.

Applestar, I was unaware that there are plants where crossed traits show up in the fruit immediately. That's yet another quirk in the bizarre set of plant reproductive behaviors. Thank goodness humans are simpler!

After my single humbling and futile attempt at hand-pollinating tomato flowers I'm unlikely to try anything of the sort in future, but I find the subject of plant breeding quite fascinating to read about.