PUNGO — It’s been a long, sweet strawberry season, with very succulent berries that have ripened from late March throughout the spring.
We might not have seen anything yet, growers said. This year’s cool temperatures and dry conditions are the strawberry’s natural friends, and they may coax the berries into blooming well into June.
“I have a lot of flowers on my berries right now,” Robert Vaughan of Vaughan Farm’s Produce told me recently, “and I expect to have berries at least through the second week of June.”
“I think that’s conservative,” said Roy Flanagan, Virginia Beach’s agriculture extension agent and a strawberry grower at Flanagan Farm. “I may have berries that will produce a month out from now.”
Father’s Day, Flanagan said, is traditionally the outer limit for strawberry season. Last year, heavy rain followed by a premature heat wave put an early end to the season soon after Mother’s Day.
This year, a strange combination of weather conditions prompted the berries to begin ripening in March. Then, production slowed in mid-season, and returned with gusto in May.
It’s been unusual, Vaughan said, because normally there are some prematurely warm days at some point in the spring.
“I can’t ever recall a year when we’ve had as many 60-degree days as this year,” he said.
At that point, Cullipher said, demand exceeded the supply – and he couldn’t produce enough berries to keep his you-pick fields open daily.
“We’d open for just a couple of days, then have to close for a day to give the berries a chance to ripen,” he said.
Flanagan noted that the cool weather extended the time required for ripening. Under normal conditions, it might take about 30 days for a bloom to mature into a ripe berry. This year, it took about 45.
Cullipher speculated that the severe cold and wind chill during Christmas could also have stunted the developing plants and slowed their production.
“I think that the wind chill affects plants just like it affects people,” Cullipher said. “You might be able to stand being out in the cold, or you might be able to stand wind, but you can’t stand the cold and the wind.”
He added, “The wind also sucks the moisture out of the plants.”
Whether it was the holiday wind chill or the spring coolness that slowed mid-season production, the berries have bounced back, and the fields are filled with ripening berries.
Growers have Ruby Junes and Chandlers, and Vaughan even has some Sweet Charlies, which are the earliest bearing berry and more often associated with early April than late May. They do, however, have a “second gear,” Vaughan said, and this year they have really produced a large second crop.
Day neutral berries, or berries that produce despite the amount of daylight, have also helped extend the strawberry season, Cullipher said.
Traditionally, strawberry plants responded to the hours of sunlight and would stop production around early June because of the lengthening days.
Today’s newer varieties are called day-neutral because their production doesn’t depend on the hours of sunlight, Cullipher said. He has seen berries as late as mid-July, and this could happen this year if the weather stays cool.
For now, growers hope for continued cool, dry conditions, and they also hope that the consumers stay interested in picking berries throughout an extended season.
“It’s all a dance,” Flanagan said.
From a consumer’s point of view, the berries are still plentiful and sweet, and the cool conditions and dry fields make for pleasant picking.
I picked a basketful the morning I wrote this column this past week, and I hope to turn them into a strawberry pie for my daughter and son-in-law to enjoy.
After all, about the only thing better than local strawberries is local strawberries with whipped cream in a graham cracker crust.
The author is a contributor to The Independent News. Her journalism has also appeared in The Virginian-Pilot.
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