The Crafty Cultivator

If you don’t want to fight the birds and squirrels for your strawberries and also want some well behaved plants that don’t send out runners like crazy, then these are the strawberries for you.

I grew my 5 clumps from seed around 201 8. They grew slow, as strawberries tend to do, but haven’t skipped a beat since then. The first few years, I didn’t get many berries, but since around 2022, I’ve gotten at least a handful from each plant.

Unlike my other strawberries that I have to fight the squirrels and slugs for(I don’t really have to battle birds eating my produce here), they have never gotten into my Yellow Wonder strawberries. It is also worth noting that since these are Fragaria vesca, (woodland strawberry), the fruit stems kind of grow up, and the berries hang down, without touching the ground. The leaf canopy tends to protect them from being seen by any competition for the fruit (birds, squirrels and hopefully toddlers, but I’ll test that theory out this summer).

As for care, I water these when needed (we’ve had a couple really bad drought years here), but try to rely mostly on rain to water, and mulch to keep the soil surface covered. Since they are low growing, and we are in a well protected and fenced yard with many other yards and fences around us, they don’t have to deal with any wind. For winter, they only protection I give them is any leaves that fall from the surrounding trees, but I don’t actually do much of anything to help them through winter and they haven’t skipped a beat. We’ve had a couple warm winters and also a couple winters with below -40 temps. The hardest things for them is the warm, many-Chinook winters where they freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw. I do try and shovel snow on them if we are in for some chinook weather to help protect them, and also let the snow melt on them to replace the moisture they lose during these times.

Like the end of my post about my ‘White Caroliona’ Strawberries, I’m going to link to this very informative page about The Alpine Yellow Wonder Strawberry at Strawberryplants.org

As it has been quite a while since I started these particular plants, I may try and start some new ones this coming winter. Then I’ll have some younger plants AND more of them to build up how many berries I can harvest, since these are small little strawberries.

Do you have a favorite variety or type of strawberry to grow? Any suggestions on different ones to add to my collection? Share it all in the comments.