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Flash Back Thursday (2010)

Fragaria alpina fraise de bois, no, this is not your high school French class; this is the name of the alpine strawberry, a strawberry with an intensely sweet taste. Although I haven’t purposely grown them for a few years, I still find them in the garden. They do reseed themselves around, but they don’t send out runners. A perfect plant for the backyard food grower, you can grow the red-fruited or yellow-fruited kind. Both are as sweet as candy. The downside is that the fruit doesn’t keep well, so you have to pick and eat them immediately. Fresh and sweet, what could be better?

With the latest craze about growing your own food, this easy-care edible fruit plant is necessary for every beginning gardener. Alpine strawberries are a perennial crop that tucks conveniently into containers and looks right at home in the ornamental garden. It makes a handsome ground cover; I took these photos of a bank of them on a hill at a property on the Hood Canal.

Slugs like the fruit, so it can be a race to beat the mollusk to the harvest. That’s the only problem these plants had in my garden. I think it’s time for me to hunt down and round up the stray seedlings around my garden and bring them together again as another food source.