Strawberry fields
Sunday April 18th 2021, 10:42 pm
Filed under: Food

Huh. I would link to it but it seems to only be in the paper copy tonight. Weird.

I still subscribe to the local newspaper. It’s one that got bought out by a hedge fund, which gutted its staff and sold its building and basically firebombed it, but it’s still the local paper.

Every now and then it justifies itself.

Because where else would they talk about winter strawberries being tasteless not because there’s no summer heat to sweeten them but because of the variety that produces then? And that UC Davis has been working on that and has just released two new winter strawberry varieties that actually taste good: the UCD Finn and the UCD Mojo to replace the tasteless Portola.

They used gene typing to figure out which genes did what they wanted and then old fashioned breeding to mix varieties that had more of those genes till they hit those two winners.

One will be dark red through and through, the other kind of a peachy orange.

I didn’t love the part where they said nobody sells berries by the variety so that while there aren’t many plants out there yet the distributors will mix the old with the new next winter and good luck.

The little geodes. We’ll have to crack them open.


5 Comments so far
Leave a comment

That’s just mean. We buy apples by variety, and grapes. Now we’ll get a mix of wonderful and horrid together, but won’t know which is which before we buy? Not nice at all.

Comment by Anne 04.19.21 @ 12:17 am

What a mix of oh-goodie and wait-what? that story is. I hope you end up being able to get to the delicious ones.

Comment by ccr in MA 04.19.21 @ 5:21 am

Forever.

Nasty little trick that is. All the work to get something that is wonderful and then just throw it back in the pot and mix together.

There is nothing, *nothing* as sweet and full of taste as an in-season southern Ontario strawberry. Oh I can hardly wait to go picking with the almost four-year-old this year. Sure hope they let us into the field around the corner!

And yes, that was intended as an ear worm. Only partly sorry about that.

Comment by Chris+S+in+Canada 04.19.21 @ 6:59 pm

I just noticed that the bags of little clementine oranges are sometimes labeled with variety – look at the info label, not the marketing branded part. Maybe if we all start asking, we can get stores to ask, too. At least strawberries aren’t as long-term of a capital investment as citrus – perhaps the crop will change to the new varieties sooner than we dare hope!

Comment by twinsetellen 04.19.21 @ 9:24 pm

We get a local variety of straberry that is sold by name. Farmers markets also show the variety. It may be the case that strawberry plants are replanted often enough that this changeover happens fast. Hope so!

Comment by Susan 04.20.21 @ 4:09 pm



Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)