Wild Strawberries

I’ve spent time several evenings after work the last two weeks picking wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana). Wild strawberries are a bit tricky. Though many plants will flower, not all plants will have berries. And they are so small that you need to find a concentration of plants with berries to make it worth your while to pick them.

My dad introduced me to wild strawberry picking. He picked these berries as a kid and my grandma would make jam from them. I don’t know why someone would want to ruin fresh delicious berries by making jam out of them.

Wild strawberries seem to like open areas with sandy, gravelly, well drained soils. Bluffs, open mossy gravel bars that are not overgrown and shaded with trees and old pastures with poorer soils and short grass that haven’t been ploughed or grazed heavily for many years are good spots to find them. Probably the best areas that I have found are the sand and gravel of open roadsides that aren’t heavily used and old pastures. One has to be careful that roadsides are not sprayed before picking berries but usually they won’t be if they are not heavily used.

Patches of wild strawberries may persist for years with the next year’s plants establishing by runners but eventually they play out just like domestic berries. This is usually reset by a disturbance of some kind, floods making new gravel bars, ploughing, fires, and of course new layers of gravel and sand.

The flavor of these small berries is intense. It is hard to describe but the closest I can come up with is that they have a very nice perfume, which may be where the genus name Fragaria comes from. In my opinion, these berries are better than even best domestic berries and I like domestic strawberries. I read somewhere that many domestic varieties of strawberries are descended from these wild strawberries and coastal strawberries (Fragaria chiloensis) which do not, to my knowledge, occur here in the Cascades.

Most of the berries I have picked this year have gone to my daughter. She really likes them. With the first batch she started out eating one at a time. After several berries, it became two at a time, then she started eating them by the fistful until they were gone, at which point she demanded more. 

This is the yield for about 15 minutes of effort. 

Yield for about 30 minutes of effort. This is the most recent batch I picked this year. The berries were pretty big for wild strawberries, making the job go faster. I like to hull the berries as I pick them. The brownish flakes amongst the berries are old flower petals.

Vashti digging in.

This, of course, is not a strawberry. It is a salmonberry and they have been ripe for the last several weeks. This is Vashti's other favorite berry (for the time being). I am not unfond of them myself. We have been giving her lots of these berries as well. We will have to keep an eye on her and, as soon as she can understand, make sure she knows which berries are okay to eat and which ones are not.