Strawberry Plants: Which Variety Should You Choose?

The most common variety of strawberries are the standard, everbearing garden strawberry. Nowadways, there are a lot more varieties available at the garden centers, and even different types of strawberry plants. In this article I'll cover the four main types of strawberry plants.

Everbearing Strawberries: As mentioned above, these are probably the most common type of strawberry plant in home gardens. Everbearing strawberries will produce 2-3 medium sized crops of berries each year. There is usually one in spring, summer and early fall. Just about all of the everbearing varieties are hybrid plants that will not produce true seeds (plants grown from the seeds will most likely produce poor tasting strawberries), except for wild strawberries which will produce true seed.

Day Neutral Strawberries: Once these plants start to flower -in late spring to early summer- they will produce strawberries continuously until the fall. The great thing about this type is that once they start producing you can be eating them just about every day until the cold weather arrives. The harvest will be much smaller than June-bearing and everbearing types, but that isn't the main purpose of these plants. This type is more suitable for having berries each day just for eating. My favorite day-neutral type is the tristar variety, it produces a lot of medium sized, yet very tasty strawberries!

June-Bearing Strawberries: These are mostly used at farms and have a short period for harvesting. They produce large crops of berries which is very suitable for canning and making jam.

Wild Strawberries: As the name suggests, these are commonly found in the wild although there are quite a few improved varieties available today. Although the improved varieties tend to produce larger strawberries, they are still much smaller than the ones produced by modern hybrid plants. Despite their size, they are packed full of flavour and very fragrant!

Getting an early start on the season with strawberries is very easy. Strawberries will be one of the first plants to start growing in the spring. In the fall, pile up a good 6" of tree leaves over your strawberry plants and not only will this help product your plants in the winter, it will help get them started very early in the season. Depending on how cold the winter is you can uncover your plants when the risk of frost is almost over. They tolerate the cold/frost quite well, so it's not a big issue in near 0 temperatures.

If you're interested in reading more of my articles, you can check out my garden blog here.