The Crafty Cultivator

Earlier this year, I got really excited about strawberries. Don’t get me wrong, I still am excited about strawberries, but I am also distracted with real life things. I bought a pack of 10 of these Hecker Strawberry crowns, but it was super early, and I ended up bringing spider mites home with them from the greenhouse, so battling those little critters took my inventory down to 2 crowns that survived the battle. Now they are outside, and battling the weather, so I’m hoping they recover once real spring weather shows up here in the next week or two. All of that to say that earlier in the year, I did a deep dive on learning about the different strawberries I was planning on adding to the garden this year (but also on the varieties I already have planted outside from previous years). So here is what I was able to find on “Hecker”

• Fragaria x ananassa ‘Hecker’
• Everbearing Day Neutral
• Hardy plants that produce large, bright red fruit all summer long, from June to September (depending on your area).
• Shows good disease resistance
• Bred and tested as Cal. 69.141-101 in the 1970’s by UC Davis in California
• This strawberry’s patent has expired, but was originally patented by UC Berkeley in California in 1978. Patent name was F. ‘CN7’

• I was able to find a PDF from 1980 detailing the 6 new strawberries that were released that year from the breeding program at UC Davis, headed by Royce Bringhurst (Professor of Pomology at UC Davis) and Victor Voth (Pomologist at the Experiment Station, Santa Ana). The following paragraph from the article is the nerdy things I love to find out about different varieties:
  • “All three new day-neutrals are third backcross generation derivatives from a male Fragaria virginiana glauca plant collected at the head of the Big Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch mountains near Salt Lake City, Utah. The day-neutral trait came from the wild strawberry. All were selected in 1971-72 at the U.C. Wolfskill Experimental Orchards near Winters”
  • In this article, on page 3, there is also a family tree for each of the new strawberries in case you wanted to deep dive into the family tree like I have.

• Named for Hecker Pass, Santa Cruz County in California.
• I managed to find a link to the Patent for this strawberry from October 23, 1978.

• Something I find quite interesting, is even though this strawberry was bred in California, just a handful of years later, it was in a test at the University of Saskatchewan evaluating the use of row covers for overwintering strawberries in our challenging prairie conditions. They concluded that both varieties (Hecker and Bounty) tested in the study were viable for commercial production in Saskatchewan. Not too shabby for a plant bred in warm and sunny California.

Now, for the other strawberries that I have, I was not able to find nearly a quarter of the same type of information. This makes me a little sad, because so much time (years, decades even), effort, and work goes into breeding and producing these plants; it would be nice if it was easy to acknowledge the people who made these varieties. It also helps to understand the best situation for the plants so you are able to replicate it as closely as you can to be as successful as possible.

Keep your fingers crossed that my two surviving crowns keep on their survival streak so I can let ya’ll know how they produce. I do think I will have to wait til next year to be able to either add more of these, or even just taste the berries. I will probably just let these 2 grow as best as they can with zero expectations, but lots of hope.

Sorry about the lack of photos for this post. My 2 remaining crowns are far too sad to document.