Strawberries

Strawberries - main season (single-bearing varieties)
Strawberry is a very special fruit, because it is the first fresh fruit of the year that you can harvest and eat right away. It is not only enjoyable and aromatic, but also healthy. The strawberry season usually starts at the end of April, depending on the weather, and lasts about 11 to 12 weeks. In order to be able to harvest over such a long period, we have different strawberry varieties and cultivation techniques. On one field we can usually harvest only 3 to 4 weeks, then all fruits are harvested from the strawberry plants.

The harvest always starts in our strawberry tunnels, here the plants are already in bloom when it is still cold outside and there are only a few rays of sunshine. The plants have a strengthened spring, i.e. through the tunnels the wind is kept away and the temperatures are much higher, especially when the sun is shining. You can think of it like driving a car in the spring when the sun is shining, it's really nice and warm inside, but when you get out it's still cold.

We get a not so strong effect by simply covering the strawberry plants from the end of February with a perforated foil. We then harvest these fields 2 to 3 weeks later. Our most original cultivation technique, where we simply plant the plants in the ground, completely avoiding the use of foil, then usually gives us delicious and sweet strawberries in June. In these fields we mainly plant the Asia variety, which is slightly later than Clery.

A part of these fields we cover already in February completely with straw, so that the plants do not get so fast what of the spring and thus then also later bloom and ripen only in the 2nd half of June.

The strawberries that ripen only at the end of June/beginning of July had a particularly long winter. These plants spend the winter and spring in cold storage at sub-zero temperatures and are not taken out of cold storage and planted in the field until early May. But then they need a lot of care, because in just 8 weeks we can then harvest this field. The yields are relatively low, but the strawberries taste all the better for it. In addition, we then leave this field for another year.

All these varieties have one thing in common, they put flowers in the plant in summer / autumn. But how does the plant actually know when summer is and that autumn is coming? Well, these varieties are intelligent, they know that the days are getting shorter and that winter is coming soon. In spring, the plant realizes that the days are getting longer again and the temperatures are rising: This is the time to push out the flowers formed in summer/fall and let the fruits ripen. In this process, the plant pushes out all the flowers within 3-4 weeks and then begins to form new flowers for the next year only when the day length decreases.

Strawberries - off-season (multiple bearing varieties)
In recent years, many new and good strawberry varieties have been bred, which are multiple bearing. These form, so to speak, regardless of the length of the day (day-neutral ) throughout the growing season flowers and then from them grow the fruit. The special thing is that these varieties now finally also taste good and not just look like strawberries. Therefore, we extend our strawberry season with these new good varieties. This year we will be able to offer you delicious strawberries every day from August to October - we are especially looking forward to this and are curious if we can awaken your strawberry desire again in the summer.

Strawberries are without a doubt our favorite fruit, to be able to harvest these delicious fruits there are no limits for us. We bed our strawberries all on straw, get up at night and cover the fields to protect the flowers from frost, give them water several times a day in small doses after planting and during the hot harvest days ...

How long do we leave the strawberries?
To anticipate the question, in the home garden you can leave the strawberries up to 3 years before you should plant new ones again, but then not on the same area, or where potatoes were! Most strawberries stay with us only 1 year, before they are plowed up again and usually in another field strawberries are planted again. A small part we also leave a second year, but here the harvest usually begins a few days later, and the fruits are no longer so large.