Fragaria × ananassa Seeds | Big Fruit Strawberry
LATIN NAME: Fragaria × ananassa
COMMON NAME: Big Fruit Strawberry
Plant Profile
The big garden strawberry is not a wild species at all but a crossing of two that met by chance in a French garden. One parent came from the east coast of North America with its hardiness and size, the other from the Pacific coast of Chile with its sweetness, and the match produced the large, red, conical fruit that since the mid-eighteenth century has replaced the tiny woodland berry on most tables.
The North American Fragaria virginiana gave the hybrid cold tolerance and a red colour; the Chilean Fragaria chiloensis gave size and a pale, fragrant flesh. Brought together in Brittany, the cross flowered but the botanist who studied it, Duchesne, mapped how the parents behaved, work that became a model for understanding plant hybrids. The result is a single species, Fragaria x ananassa, written with the multiplication sign to mark its mixed birth.
The red hue is pelargonidin glycoside, the bright anthocyanin of the strawberry, laid over white flesh beneath the skin. The berry also carries ellagic acid and vitamin C, and the aroma is a blend of furaneol with ester notes that breeders select for. The green achenes on the surface are the true fruits and hold the seed; they are harmless to eat and mark ripeness when they sit flush in red tissue.
The fruit needs little doing, but how you treat it changes the result. Cold and a quick bite preserve the scent that heat destroys.
Set the young plants in a matted row and let the runners root to renew the bed, removing the first flush of blossoms on a new plant so it builds roots before it crops. The fruit hangs best just off the soil on a mulch of straw, which keeps it clean and deters slugs. Renew the oldest crowns from fresh runners every few seasons to keep the patch young and the berries large.
Science & Biotechnology
The garden strawberry carries eight sets of chromosomes, fifty-six in all, which is why it is so variable and so easy to breed for size and firmness. The plant is a low perennial that spreads by runners like its wild cousin, and the “fruit” is again a swollen flower base studded with the true dry seeds, the achenes, on its red surface. A ripe berry should carry its seeds evenly and its colour through to the tip.
The garden berry’s colour and tang come from the same classes of compound found in its wild cousin, just in a bigger, bred package. The flesh is mostly water and sugar, with the phenolics that give it bite.
Uses & Benefits
Because the fruit must travel, modern lines are selected for firm flesh and a long shelf life, traits that trade a little scent for toughness. Open-pollinated and heirloom types keep more of the wild perfume, which is why gardeners who grow for taste choose older varieties over the shipping types. A faint sour edge near the tip is normal and fades with full sun ripeness.
Eat the berries the day they are picked, cool, and unsugared to taste the true flavour, or halve them over cream where their juice does the work. Cook them gently with sugar into a jam, or crush them into a cold soup with a little wine. Because the berry is soft and picks up water, wash it only if needed and dry it on a cloth rather than soaking.
Growing from Seed
Most growers start from runner plants rather than seed, but the rule for setting out is the same: keep the crown at the surface and never bury it. The plant wants sun and a humus-rich, slightly acidic bed.
Set bare-root or potted plants into the ground when the crown is firm and about two centimetres across, spacing them thirty centimetres apart in a row with the crown exactly at the soil line. Too deep and the crown rots; too high and the roots dry. Water in well and mulch with straw so the first berries rest clean. A spring planting crops the same season in most districts.
Feed the bed with a balanced liquid as the flowers open and again after the first pick, and keep the soil evenly moist through the fruit swelling. Thin the runners so the row does not choke itself, and lift and reset the healthiest young plants every three seasons. Net the fruit against birds and clear fallen berries to stop grey mould in wet weather.
Our Take
The big garden strawberry is the fruit to grow for the bowl, not the lab. For wild-scented kin, sow the Wild Strawberry seed Fragaria vesca, the Strawberry seed “white”, or the musk-scented Fragaria moschata seed.
Related Reading
More species in the same orbit as Big Fruit Strawberry: