I love a good, respectful debate. Especially one that challenges me to know more.
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It’s up to you but i like to try one or two from my plants to see if they’re worth the effort in the long run.
Pinching does ultimately help second year bearing plants get bigger though. I tested this one out with feijoa and the ones with the fruits pulled were 2x bigger than the ones where i left a few fruit. This was last years trial.
Also my Pineberry that only produced 1 subpar berry is going crazy this year with much bigger flowers and more of them as well.
Currently, none of the bees are interested in my strawberries and my one June bearing variety only has 1 pollinated flower it looks like so I’m going to let it do it’s thing. Sometimes nature does the pruning for you.
I’m assuming my first rounds of strawberries won’t get pollinated until the blueberry flowers are done. The bees won’t even touch my lavender or other flowers right now which is interesting to me.
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on the day neutral varieties they say to just not let them fruit on their first flower set. are they just clipping off the end of the flower bunch or the flower stem all the way back to the crown? mine are indoor, hydroponic albions.
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I just pinch mine off at the ends but since i don’t have pollinators on them right now, that’s doing it for me 
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In my personal opinion, hydroponic strawberries don’t do as well nor do they get as sweet. I started growing them hydroponically in 2012 but stopped a few years later for this reason.
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I have been reading on ‘Ozark Beauty’ for a little bit… its a very common variety thats been around awhile that has almost no true pictures or reviews. Lots of planting videos and nursery ads but not many true reviews other than the folks that have failed with them.
TNHunter said this last year… and i trust his opinion.
Information that i hadnt seen before-
The Ozark Beauty Strawberry was bred by J.B. Winn of Arkansas and introduced in 1955. Ozark Beauty strawberry plants were bred from the Red Rich Strawberry and the Twentieth Century Strawberry.
If you dig deep into the decades old forums you can read where folks in Florida and Alaska have grown them with good results… but other than that not much newer information or reports can be found.
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Ozark Beauty was the first strawberries I grew and I was underwhelmed. Taste was okay, but productivity wasn’t great. I also prefer June bearing to get one big crop since the trickle of berries later in the season from overbearing types are usually eaten by birds and chipmunks.
The next year I planted Earliglow and Jewel (both June bearing) which were both great, with a slight preference for Earliglow. I later tried Albion, which is an everbearing that definitely beats Ozark, at least to me.
I’m now growing Chandler with my first real crop developing now.
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I’m trying ozark beauty one last time…
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Here is what im starting over with…
Cabrillo
Sparkle
Charlotte
Evie-2
Tristar
Tribute
Rainier
Hood
Mary’s Peak
Sweet Sunrise
Seascape
Puget Crimson
Old North Sea
Sweet Charlie
Earliglow
Flavorfest
Flamingo
Eversweet
Jewel
Albion
Quinalt
Eclair
Chandler
Sequoia
Fort Laramie
White-D Pineberry
Flamingo
Scarlett
I will never grow in a ‘strawberry bed’ again… I had two going but i guess my soil was too good… i had runners snaking under very tall and lush plants and by the end of the season i had no idea what was what.
Growing 2/3 of each one in gutters and 2/3 in pots to see which version i like best.
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if you liked earliglow try galetta. one of its parents is earliglow. it has bigger sweeter berries and is more productive. i still have a few escapees under some of my fruit trees that still give me a few fruit. in unfertilized soil they dont produce much but dont send out a ton of runners either.
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i tried raised beds as well. too much work. with the bed covered in ground cover cloth you can control how many runners’ root. the rest i pot to give away our just let them run off onto the lawn where they get mowed anyway. i have 2 4’ x12’ raised beds of flavorfest that are going to fruit just before the 4th of Jul.
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For those of you like me that have seen Tristar in the box stores in those boxes that they spent way more time and effort creating than figuring out how to keep strawberries alive in the desert dust of the bags… in which you pay $ to hope and pray that somehow a sliver of life still remains in the roots…
‘an impromptu taste test for him when he stopped by the Mountain Sweet Berry stand one recent Saturday morning, the Frenchman, tossing aside allegiance to his mother country, picked the Tristars over the Mara des Bois without hesitation.’
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It’s behind a pay wall. Can’t read it
No paywall for me… but i am behind a VPN…so here is the article.
Most local strawberry connoisseurs are familiar with the Tristar, Greenmarket small, sweet answer to the supermarket’s transcontinental behemoths. But few are aware of the behind-the-scenes drama that has put the future of this superfruit in jeopardy. The David in this tale is Rick Bishop of Mountain Sweet Berry Farm, who in 1985 crashed the Union Square farmers’ market with his Cornell University roommate Gerald Posner and a pickup truck full of Tristars and has been selling them to besotted chefs and discerning Greenmarket shoppers ever since. Goliath would be Planasa, the multinational horticultural corporation that in 2017 acquired Norcal, the California nursery that supplies Bishop’s virus-free bare-root plants, the raw material of commercial berry farming, and dropped Tristars from its product roster this past March.
To grasp the magnitude of this business decision, one must first appreciate the outsize position the tiny Tristar occupies in the greater metropolitan area’s local-and-seasonal-produce hierarchy. It is hands down the No. 1 strawberry among what Bishop refers to as the Greenmarket contingent of “little old ladies and French chefs who run the show.” For these partisans, “strawberry” equals “Tristar”; they accept no substitutes. The day-neutral variety was bred in Maryland from a wild Utah mountain berry crossed with strains from New Jersey and California, and it’s prized as much for its vivid flavor and dense red flesh as for the fact that it can bear fruit from May through October (hence its name, star of three seasons). In short, it is everything the mainstream specimen is not: diminutive, aromatic, sweet through and through. But also: low-yield (a mother plant puts out seven runners, or baby plants, versus a stronger variety’s 20 to 24); too delicate to transport great distances; and labor-intensive, both to grow and to pick (there are 32 to 50 in a pint, compared to 12 to 15 California-grown jumbos).
These downsides have understandably prevented Tristars from being widely propagated by the large commercial nurseries that supply Bishop and his fellow Greenmarket purveyors Berried Treasures and Fantasy Fruit with their first-generation plant stock. But the berry thrives in their Catskills climate, with cool nights triggering fruiting. And so the news from Norcal earlier this year spelled imminent doom—not only because Tristar sales represent 80 percent of Bishop’s annual revenue but because his clientele has come to associate small strawberries with big flavor. “I feel like I’m pigeonholed,” he says. “They all say, ‘Give me the little ones.’ ” As a contingency plan, Bishop quickly stockpiled as many remaining plants as he could, as well as Tributes, another, slightly larger day-neutral variety, also canceled by Planasa, and put in 10,000 plants of the well-regarded French berry, Mara des Bois. But neither has won over Tristar superfans: The Tributes are more watery, the Mara des Bois less dense. “The chefs haven’t really responded to them,” says Bishop. Which chefs? Well, Greenmarket regular Jean-Georges Vongerichten for one. When Bishop conducted an impromptu taste test for him when he stopped by the Mountain Sweet Berry stand one recent Saturday morning, the Frenchman, tossing aside allegiance to his mother country, picked the Tristars over the Mara des Bois without hesitation.
Desperate to find a new source, Bishop went down the list of national nurseries from Cornell’s ag department, trying to sweet-talk any of them into planting a crop that will never earn them as much per acre as more vigorous varieties. With dispiriting responses ranging from “This variety is going away, as it should” to “There’s no amount of money you could pay me,” the berry’s future looked bleak. Finally, one of Bishop’s cold calls connected him with Pat Coash of Koppes Plants in Watsonville, near Santa Cruz. After first turning him down, Coash called back and agreed to devote about three-quarters of an acre to Tristars, provided Bishop send him 18,000 plants immediately. “I can do a better job than Norcal,” Coash told Bishop, suggesting that the fate of New York’s tiny-berry supply and our best pastry chefs’ dessert menus may very well rest on the competitive impulses of rival California plant nurseries.
To hedge his bets, Bishop has built a small nursery on his own Roscoe, New York farm, which won’t bear fruit until 2021, and he won’t receive plants from Koppes until next year. But for now, he says, he’s “swimming in strawberries,” thanks to his mad dash to stock up. Which is a good thing for him, and a better thing for the greater Tristar-popping population. One such devotee is Superiority Burger’s Brooks Headley, who uses them in salads and sorbets and on cakes. “Yes, they are a pain to prep, and the yield is pretty low,” he says. “But I don’t care. The flavor is quite simply the best. They feel very New York City to me. If they are gone? It will definitely be an intense mourning period. I’m not willing to accept it. Especially if it’s corporate America killing off another inefficient yet totally beautiful thing.”
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Thank you, i wonder what they would say now if they could have Charlotte lol. I even love Charlotte’s name.
Oh! And another one of my 3rd year Charlotte’s are starting to mutate again and give me pink edged petals! It didn’t do this last year and as far as I’m concerned, i haven’t been met with any type of herbicide this year. I don’t use herbicides and there’s 0 notions of herbicide damage or use by the neighbors as far as i can tell.
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Curious to hear from others as I noticed a few on mine. It’s rained almost daily…
I like to pick those off and either burn the leaves or throw them away to keep them from spreading.
Immunox was a good suggestion
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