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Wild Strawberries!

Bri Leichliter
Jun 22, 2016
2 min read

Close your eyes...

Imagine yourself picking a strawberry in your backyard and popping it into you mouth. The taste is so sweet. You can't imagine buying another strawberry at the grocery store...for $4+ dollars a pound! Boy, the thought of that makes the strawberry taste even sweeter.

OK now close your eyes again...

Imagine that same scenario, but the strawberry you popped in your mouth had NO TASTE!

Uh yeah...that happened to me.

So what the heck happened to these strawberries? I have hundreds, and that's not an exaggeration, of strawberry plants around our house. Once I knew what I was looking for, I could spot them everywhere.

See those little plants with three leaves? Strawberry plants. I was so excited when I learned what they were that I had to dig out everything I could find that was in harms way of being dug out with the rhododendron roots.

I dug out at least 100 plants and temporarily potted them. I ran out of pots so I made a makeshift pot out of a cardboard box. It was a little ridiculous on the amount of strawberry plants that came out of a 2x2 foot section of our garden bed. Some of those pots had 2 to 5 plants in them!

It was obvious to me that they multiplied through the years and would keep multiplying based on the number and length of runners the plants had on them. In the picture above, you can see some of the runners. They look like long strings.

The typical wild strawberries that are reminiscent of what we buy in the grocery store are slightly different. Other than being sprayed with pesticides (unless you go ORGANIC!), many grocery store varieties are genetically altered to produce larger berries. So why did these strawberries have no taste? Funny you should ask!

Strawberry plants flower before they produce fruit. See these yellow flowers? Don't confuse them with buttercups!

The yellow flowers are a different variety of wild strawberries commonly referred to as Indian Strawberries (Duchesnea Indica). If you're wondering if you have strawberries that are sweet like the grocery store or farmer's market variety, look for WHITE flowers (Fragaria Virginiana). Don't mind the little pieces of grass stuck to this guy. I snapped this pictured right after the DH was finished mowing.

Most people write these little indian strawberries off as weeds since the berries aren't really palatable, but since the plants don't get very tall and they spread like wildfire from their runners, they make great ground cover. It jut so happens we have a LARGE problem area in our yard.

Meet Bertha the Bank. She's large and in charge and a huge pain to mow. I'm sure you can tell that by the 2 foot tall grass that covers half of her. Needless to say I was looking for something to replace the grass with that we don't have to mow or weed eat. I was thinking more along the lines of phlox or creeping thyme, but why spend the money when I have hundreds of these little babies on our property?