Home » Plants & Animals » Vegetable Gardening » Alpine Strawberries

Alpine Strawberries

© Marie Iannotti

Alpine Strawberries

Maybe you've noticed the dainty wild strawberry looking plants growing wild in the woods, by the roadside or even in your lawn and wondered if they were really strawberries or just a weed with an incredibly cleaver disguise.  Chances are good they are indeed a type of edible strawberry.   In fact, they are a very old variety.  Wood strawberries, also known as fraise de bois, were mentioned in the writings of Greek antiquity.   The alpine strawberry (Fragaria vesca), is a close cousin that can be easily cultivated in your home garden.  In M.M. Vilmorin-Andrieux "The Vegetable Garden", he mentions that alpine strawberries were brought to France in 1754 and met with a ready welcome.

Alpine Strawberries are a bit larger than the wild variety, but still much smaller the the modern hybrids.  So why grow them?  Well, people have considered their delicate, succulent strawberry flavor a treat worth the effort for hundreds of years now.  While you won't get a huge crop, they do fruit continuously throughout your growing season.  They've even been nicknamed the "perpetual strawberry".

Alpines don't send out runners and so don't need careful watching.  Something new I learned while researching this article is that the straw in strawberry is from the verb to strew.  Even without runners, alpine strawberries will re-seed readily.  They prefer partial shade with at least 4 hours of sun daily and will form a compact plant about 10" high, with an 8" spread.  You'll fare better with soil that is rich in organic matter.  The roots are very shallow and mulching will help keep them moist, as well as safe from the hoe

Alpine strawberries also come in shades of pale yellow and white.  Some people report better success in foiling thieving birds by growing the light colored varieties.  The fruits are also a little larger than the red strains.

CyberNiche Software offers Growing Hints for Alpine Strawberries, an excerpt from their book.  Superb Herbs also has cultivating, harvesting and use hints. Michigan State University Extension's fact sheet, Fragaria--Wild Strawberry, Alpine Strawberry  mentions some interesting cultivars to tempt you as well as listing buying sources.

The copyright of the article Alpine Strawberries in Vegetable Gardening is owned by . Permission to republish Alpine Strawberries in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.