Kitchen Garden Forum

Please advise me how to make strawberry sweet.
Our strawberries have nice big berries but they don't taste sweet, just watery. It must be lack of something but I don't know what it is.

The plants are on the sunny position and two years old (second harvesting season). I don't know what sort of strawberry they are.

Any comments appreciated.

Thanks

I think it largely depends on the variety grown. Two years ago I bought 3 plants of two different varieties, One I think was called Elsanta, and the other was Cambridge ??. I forgot which was which, complicated by the fact that I haphazardly planted their runners in any spare space. Some of the fruit I am now picking have a delicious true Strawberry taste. Others are pretty nonedescript. When I eventually clear my strawberry bed and start again, I will make sure I actually taste some varieties first. (Now I understand why I saw somebody nicking ripe strawberries from plants on sale in a garden centre and saying to me "Just testing first". Perhaps the only thing you can do is leave them to get as ripe as possible as even marginally underripe berries taste rather sour.

I agree that for the best flavour you need to leave them until they are at their ripest. The advice I follow is to wait until they're ready to pick and then wait another day.
If the plants are in a sunny position the only thing I can suggest is that they may be getting too much water, or, as Primrose suggests, are just a rather tasteless variety.
You could try cutting out all watering except when they're flowering and leaving them another day or two on the plants. As they're in their second year maybe clear another patch for a replacement variety famous for their flavour.

Odds on Cambridge Favourite have the flavour - smaller and more pointed?

Hi Hiroko,
I read your post earlier, since then Ive been down to the tunnel picking some strawbs. I have about 80 plants on a home made table top growing system.(very Heath Robinson but it works.) I have Gariguette, Royal Gauntlet,Korona,Chelsea Pensioner, Hapil, and Elsanta plus a couple of others the labels have gone adrift. As I was picking I was tasting them with you in mind. They were all scrummy in their own way, all slightly different but all tasty, with Elsanta probably being the only "watery" one. So I agree with the postings above treat yourself to a selection of other varieties.(I rate Gariguette and Royal Gauntlet.) As for "making" them tasty high potash feed is generally recomended, mine are in a loamy mix with some Kays "loads of Spuds" fertilizer and a bit of Vitax Q4 added.All the best. Strawberry Tart.

Chelsea Pensioner is high up the table for taste/sweetness.
Regards.

I may be imagining this but I suspect the latest fruiting are the best-flavoured. Ours are growing in some shade and take longer to ripen anyway, but we like that because it gives us a chance to plump up the berries with seaweed feed before they take colour. We like the newish one called Mae. There's a cultivar of the wild, alpine strawberry called Alexander which is ambrosial, though tiny. These definitely do better in some shade but they're worth having for topping little tarts and cakes and trifles, especially with a dab of sweetened marscapone.

I mulch mine with pine needles var Mara de Bois which has a taste very similar to the wild woodland strawberry bags of perfume flavour and sweet. It is a perpetual variety.