Askungen: flavour and growing

What do you want from your garden?

A strawberry bed can offer much more than one red variety: combine early summer harvests, everbearers and small, fragrant wild strawberries. White and yellow fruits need different ripeness checks from red ones.

Flavour and use

Garden strawberries vary in sweetness and acidity, juiciness and firmness. Wild strawberry types have a stronger aroma; treat unusual flavours as observations by the named grower when comparing them.

Choose a suitable spot

A sunny bed or pot with good drainage. Position the crown at soil level; keep water available during fruit growth.

From flower to fruit

Specific exceptions stated explicitly: Frau Mieze Schindler needs another strawberry variety flowering at the right time. The grower describes Askungen and Marie Charlotte as self-pollinating.

How to give the plant a place

A bed with a spread-out harvest: Choose an early and a late summer-fruiting cultivar, plus a perpetual-fruiting one. Plant with the crown at soil level. Lay straw beneath the fruit and check moisture. Label the cultivars and compare ripe fruits.

Pots along the terrace: Use pots with drainage holes. Position them in the sun and keep the crown clear. Check pot moisture often during warm periods. Pick regularly and remove unhealthy fruit.

Care throughout the season

Keep fruits off the soil, remove spoiled fruit and limit runners if harvesting takes priority.

Recognise the right time to pick

Summer-fruiting cultivars give a concentrated harvest; perpetual-fruiting cultivars extend the picking season. Harvest when ripe: strawberries do not become sweeter after picking.

Follow your own harvest

Record the cultivar and whether it is summer-fruiting or perpetual-fruiting. Follow flowering, fruit set and actual picking; there is no single fixed date from planting for every type.

Turn your space into a garden for experimenting

Turn a strawberry bed into a small trial garden. For example, plant an early summer-fruiting cultivar beside a late cultivar and a perpetual-fruiting one, with a clear label for each row. This lets you compare not just one sweet fruit with another, but also when you can pick them. Keep unusual wild strawberry and musk strawberry types clearly separate: their growth and pollination need not match those of ordinary garden strawberries.

When planting, look at where the roots and leaves meet. This crown stays at soil level; planting too deeply causes problems, while planting too shallowly lets roots dry out. Spread the roots in the planting hole, then water. Straw goes beneath the ripening fruit, not in a wet mass on top of the crown. Drainage holes help in a pot, but also check that water can actually escape.

For a flavour comparison, pick fruits that are genuinely ripe. A white strawberry need never turn red; look for that selection's characteristics, scent and softness. Taste without sugar and compare aroma, acidity and firmness. Soft fruit may be delicious eaten immediately, while a firmer strawberry is easier to carry indoors in a picking container.

Which flavour would you like to discover?

Honeoye: Early; firm, large fruit.

Cambridge Favourite: Middentijds; betrouwbare tuinkeuze.

Hapil: Early to mid-season; large, sweet berries.

Florence: Late; firm, flavoursome fruit.