I’ll have to wait a while maybe next year to really test it.
My Albion I have like 10sqft of plants which give dozens of berries every month but the mara is very new and I’ve only had 5 berries lol
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Try the mighty mint peppermint spray. It really works for mice/rodents. You just have to keep up with it.
I grow mine packed in homemade 4x8’ beds. In February I thin them but just leave all the plants in there like mulch. I use a sprinkler to water them early in the morning on hot days. My berries are way more strawberry-y than anyone else’s berries that I have tasted, and except for the back strain of picking them, very little work. It gets very hot here - over 100 several Junes in a row, and I think the conserved moisture is a big help. Also , the tight spacing is good camouflage. Whenever I start a new bed (2 of them this year in my garden, and 2 in Mom’s) the birds get a lot of the berries. They are just too obvious lying there.
Speaking of obvious, I thought my barn cat,Zorro, was pretty obvious lying in a bed (see that matted down spot?) waiting for something to catch, but he caught and ate a pocket gopher right in front of me.
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Tonight’s harvest.they’re a little dry because it’s hot out, but I don’t have time to pick them in the morning.
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unforunitely i havent grown them in a few years. they spread profusely and the fruit was small and not much of them. flavor was good though.
Do you remove runners and thin them every year after they fruit?
I do.
It’s been a very wet year so far. I’ve had a lot of leaf spot, so I wanted to get as many infected leafs out and get some sun and airflow. Weeded and thinned out the patch as well.
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The deer did that for me this year 
Betweenthe deer, rodents, and birds, I think I got a decent harvest 
We still have some in the fridge from last time and this was more than enough for us for the day 
so i don’t mind the birds getting the extras
This was just 2 days before other day with all the kiddos
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Mutant Charlotte update:
It has not kept its hairy berry trait. Some animal or my own dog lol, got the first ripened berry so the extra extra sweet is still yet to be seen. There’s a few ripening now
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So my grand strawberry experiment results are in. Marshall is in fact very tasty, probably the tastiest one I’ve had so far, although yields and looks are not crazy (photos below).
In other news - alpines are a huge disappointment. As a kid I grew up foraging musk strawberries in the woods of Eastern Europe and was kind of expecting something like that but alpines completely pale in comparison. A few were ok I guess, Yellow Wonder and Mignonette were good enough that I bothered to look up what I planted there but the rest were meh at best.
I also went back to my patch of musk strawberries to do side by side comparison and they are so much better, it’s not close - an intense mix of sweet, sour and flavor.
I also have some PNW native woodland strawberry growing, but it’s too small to produce right now.
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Oh boy, now I want musk strawberries!
My June bearers decided it was July after 4 days in the 90s so whatever I get by now is pretty small.
If you do buy them, don’t get a lot because they reproduce through runners like crazy.
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mine are still flowering, no berries yet! but, flowers instead of runners only which is progress
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Mine seem to put out flowers before runners. Some runners are finally starting to pop out
I have an unlabeled but big and sweet berry in a strawberry pot… it’s sweeter than the other very large ones and i gave it about 3 days to ripen hoping nothing else could see it during those days. It was so perfect.
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Oh! Mutant Charlotte kept it’s super sweeter than all others profile!
No hairy berries this year but i didn’t have to wait to extra days for it to get super sweet. Picked as soon as it got red-red which was just 1 day after turning regular red lol. The other Charlottes haven’t shown this quality yet.
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Thats good to hear for me. I bought musk strawberry seeds and only 3 survived. If they spread and give me a nice little patch, I will be happy.
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Just do note that musk strawberries come with dedicated male and female plants; micromanaging that is probably the only pain point of growing them.
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