strawberries everywhere followup

I did recall one thing last year, confirmed recently by the emerging yellow flowers.  What I thought were strawberry runners under the clothesline are not entirely just garden strawberries.  There are also what’s known as mock strawberries aka Indian strawberries or false strawberries.  There are lots of medicinal uses for them, and I also read that in India, they are often considered an offering to the gods.  I definitely like them as a groundcover, so that’s a gift to me!

Then today before the storm rolled in (which is happening as I write this), I noticed I wasn’t completely crazy in remembering garden strawberries, as we did have typical white flowered strawberries in that area as well.

It’s still a bit soon to tell which variety/ies are the ones growing, though they’re likely Virginia strawberry/wild strawberry/common strawberry (Fragaria virginiana).  They have white flowers and definitely are the kind you can eat.  I remember seeing them mostly as runners last year, but don’t recall flowers.  Hopefully the flowers are a sign we’ll get some we can eat this year.  (From what I’ve read, runner years often are not the food years because the plant is putting its energy into the runners, but it depends on the strain.  It’s the year after that matters for most.  Similar to berry cane cycles like with blackberries.)  More have showed up since my last shot of them along the driveway.

Unfortunately, with the regrade work I’ve been doing on the safety glass bed, I see no sign yet of last year’s strawberries that grew there.  They also seemed to arrive a bit later in the season, so maybe they’re still dormant and I didn’t somehow harm them yet.

I’ve tried to be careful about the plantings, but the bed is so thickly covered with those raspberry runners that’s it’s been difficult not to disturb other plants just from thinning the raspberries–forget the safety glass removal.

That bed was the only strawberries we did eat last year.  I think they are a true wild variety, as they were less sweet than I’m used to, but it might also have been that they didn’t grow well given the smothering going on in that bed.  I thought I had a picture of them last year, but I can’t seem to find it.

I’m doing my best to give the ones along the driveway a fighting chance to berry this year.  I’ve since weeded a bit more in that long stretch, and now that I’m seeing more white flowered variants popping up under the clotheslines run, I’m thinking of transplanting those to the driveway bed as well, possibly even starting another on the western side of the driveway.  If I leave them where they are, they’ll just get trampled when I’m hanging clothes (another reason they might not have produced fruit last year.)