Grow June bearing strawberries from seed?

[Wildcat82]

In south central Texas you need to set out your strawberry plants the later half of October. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to find plants that time of year. I realize store bought berries are always hybrids but it seems quite a few people have success from seeds they collected from hybrid tomatoes they've grown. I'm curious if its worth my time and effort collecting seeds from grocery store strawberries and growing those out. Anyone have experience with this?

[Setec Astronomy]

Well, not from grocery store strawberries, but I grew 2 kinds from purchased seed last year, and I'm growing those 2 plus one more variety from seed right now. It just takes a long time and the plants are very sensitive when they are small, you can't overheat them or let them dry out, they are tiny. FWIW I just read the other day that the accepted germination rate for strawberry seeds being sold is only 60% min.

PS The ones I am growing are not June-bearing, but Alpine and day-neutral.

[Wildcat82]

Well, not from grocery store strawberries, but I grew 2 kinds from purchased seed last year, and I'm growing those 2 plus one more variety from seed right now. It just takes a long time and the plants are very sensitive when they are small, you can't overheat them or let them dry out, they are tiny. FWIW I just read the other day that the accepted germination rate for strawberry seeds being sold is only 60% min.

PS The ones I am growing are not June-bearing, but Alpine and day-neutral.

Which day neutral varieties did you grow? How were they for taste and production?

[Setec Astronomy]

I grew Elan from seed, which is a hybrid I bought from Johnny's. They were very good taste-wise, hard to tell on the production since it was the first year and I only grew 3 plants. Everything I have grown so far has been in containers, although most of the seedlings I'm growing right now I plan to put in a garden bed, probably for the chipmunks, but we'll see if they leave some for me.

[Tormahto]

Close to 20 years ago I tried sowing seeds from a few overripe store bought strawberries. Germination was well under 50% is all I remember. That, and that I started them (surface sown?) in a large pot, about 15" in diameter. I had many seedlings growing throughout the season. I overwintered the large pot in the unheated garage. I checked on it the first warm day of early spring, and some critter had chewed down all of the seedlings.

"Wild" plants of likely hybrids pop up around here quite a bit, as it's a favorite food for many birds. These wild ones are small, but pack a punch of semi-sweet to sometimes sweet flavor. They are not as juicy as the large cultivated ones, but if I had to choose between them, it's the wild ones for me.

Many appear to suffer from leaf diseases (no fruit problems), perhaps due to no watering, infertile soil, and sometimes not enough sun.

[Setec Astronomy]

I overwintered the large pot in the unheated garage. I checked on it the first warm day of early spring, and some critter had chewed down all of the seedlings.

Oddly enough, when I started growing strawberries a few years ago, I had to buy 25 bare root plants which was way too many for the "strawberry bag" I intended them for, so I put some in all the old pots I had hanging around. Come winter I put the bag and one large pot in the garage, expecting all the ones outside to die. Come spring, the ones I had left outside were fine, in better shape than the ones that spent the winter in the garage, which wound up getting kind of dried out.

[svalli]

This year I am growing strawberries from seed first time. I started Rainbow Treasure seeds in mid January and after transplanting the tiny seedlings to 4" pots they started to grow fast. Couple of them are flowering and I have pollinated the flowers with a paint brush. The plants which have no buds yet have started to grow runners and I have used a piece of metal wire to secure those on top of the soil to root. The seed packet had 13 seeds and 10 of those germinated, which is quite good.

Rainbow Trasure first of April.jpg

About a month ago I sowed seeds of Yellow Cream alpine strawberries. From 21 seeds 9 have germinated and the plants are small. We have a lot of wild red alpine strawberries growing on our yard and I thought that these would be nice addition to grow next to the red ones.

Yellow Cream April 5th.jpg

Originally we had the wild ones growing only on one spot on our yard and our son used to pick them. He used to throw the "ugly" ones to my flower bed next to patio and in few years that flower bed was taken over by the strawberries. I did not mind that since only flowers, which grew there well were daffodils and during summer it was too dry for other flowers. I have now let the strawberries to grow as ground cover on a dry gravel slope. These alpines are hardy and drought tolerant.

I have seen pictures of collecting strawberry seeds from berries by a potato peeler. That would be an interesting experiment to do to see what kind of plants grow out of them.

Sari

[Tormahto]

A potato peeler! Why didn't I think of that? I used a pocket knife, and was warned to whittle outside.

Rumor has it (catalog blurbs) that birds don't go after the yellow strawberries very much.

[bower]

I just saw a nice video about collecting strawberry seeds by peeling off strips and letting them dry on a paper towel. When the strips were dry- completely stuck to the paper -, it was easy to rub off the seeds.

I'm just wondering about potting up some of my seedlings, which are still very small.
I had a lot of seeds, but I made some mistakes. the first ones, I transplanted to cell pack when the largest had one true leaf. Some of the seedlings didn't survive. The others are growing pretty slowly and some are still very tiny, even with three or 4 true leaves.
I also made the mistake of not having any liquid ferts on hand to help the strawberries grow. Just picked up yesterday some fish emulsion and also a promix/myco liquid fert with higher K.
On the last batch of seeds I started, I left them much longer before moving any. Some of them already had two true leaves so I put the largest ones, four in a four inch pot. They seemed to need the extra depth and they're doing very well. I also put more compost into the mix (with promix) since I'm getting algae on the peatier mix.
So now I'm wondering whether to take those older but smaller strawberry plants out of the cell packs and into the deeper 4 inch pots. I don't have enough space to give each plant a pot now, as the greenhouse temperatures are still too wild for small seedlings. So I would put 3 or 4 of them in one 4 inch pot, hoping they will do better than the shallow cell packs.
What do you think?
(These are alpine or everbearing varieties).

[wykvlvr]

Okay this is all yall's fault. I read the thread and suddenly had an urge to try strawberries again but needed to figure out which kind would be best. So started researching and then I stumbled across this article about different colored strawberries and the hunt was on. https://www.epicgardening.com/different ... awberries/

Purple Wonder was easy to find but those plants at Burpee's are pricey

Baker Creek has 4 different alpine types including White Soul and Yellow Wonder both mentioned in the article was well as Alexandria which I have seen mentioned as a good plant for my area...

Urban Farmer has Musk strawberries from the article AND a normal red strawberry call Fresca to start from seed that sounded good.

Johnny's has seeds for a new variety with pink double blossoms called Summer Breeze Cherry Blossom that looks really intriguing, Elan also looked interesting for a "normal" strawberry grown from seed.

Pinetree has a couple of alpine varieties and an interesting looking one called Rainbow Treasure Strawberry which has seeds that can produce plants with white, pink, or rose flowers.

Other seeds I found in different places were Tristan and similar varieties which all have single pink flowers

So now heading this way are the Musk Strawberries and Fresca form Urban Farmer, the alpine strawberries White Soul, Yellow Wonder, and Alexander are heading this way from Baker Creek.
PLUS I am hemming and hawing about the Rainbow Treasure Strawberry seeds at Pinetree and that double pink at Johnny's..

[Whwoz]

Very interesting thread folks, often wondered about the best way to collect strawberry seeds, shall have to give it a try with the Hokowase that I am growing.

@svalli, you may want to consider trimming some of those runners off. Plants that are producing runners are far less inclined to flower from my experience.

[bower]

Here is the video that looked really easy and a great method for seed saving, just stick the raw slices onto a paper towel and let them dry:


I got my strawberry seeds from Ukrainian Real Seeds on Amazon. Classic Baron Solemaher alpine, Renaissance (also everbearing not the European summer one), a pink flowered F1 called Lizonka, and a bonus pack sent to me 'Regina' alpine which unfortunately I didn't nurture right so being older seeds I got no survivors of my sprouts. And Nicky sent me fresh Reugen seeds which were planted later and sprouted like mad, quickly overtaking the others. I did a better job waiting for these to be ready to transplant too, so they're looking great.

I bought two pots of everbearing "un named" variety last fall or late summer. Mine got planted in the ground, Mom didn't get hers in, so I took the pot home and potted them up and pollinated all the flowers under lights about 20 on one plant. The fruit from my garden plants were insanely delicious and the latest ones were Oct or Nov, what a shock and a treat to find. So I gave Mom the plants with set berries but also transplanted a runner from one of them... here it is now under my lights, just blushing the first (very large) berry. Very tempted to do the slice and dry on these as well. Strawberry seedlings are one of the most delicate I've ever dealt with it's a challenge! But... could be so worth it.

Apologies for the need of a new camera, at least it shows the size of seedlings. Darn small!!

strawberry-blush-004.JPG

strawb-seedlings-006.JPG

[Shule]

I've grown strawberry plants from seed, both for diploid alpine strawberries and regular octoploid everbearing (not June-bearing) strawberries.

My experience was that for every 200 seeds (corresponding to about one fruit) in an octoploid strawberry, you might get one or two to germinate (but they do germinate). For alpine strawberries, germination rates are much, much higher.

While alpine strawberries are fairly easy to grow after saving the seeds, you don't actually have to save the seeds to grow a strawberry. Just take a fresh strawberries or two and mush it up into the soil. Then water and let them grow.

Octoploid strawberries seem to take longer to grow after germinating, too.

We started getting Verticillium issues (brought in by a store-bought Green Globe artichoke) around the time I was experimenting with this, and it decimated our strawberries before I got fruit on the octoploid strawberries. I had been growing alpines successfully for years up to that point, though.

One thing you need to know about alpine strawberries is that although they don't typically produce runners, they do multiply at the base, and you do need to split them up once in a while.

The octoploid strawberries I grew were from fruit that someone locally grew. They weren't store-bought. Anyway, my plan was to grow them, get fruits, and grew new plants, repeating that processes to get additional acclimatization, and select for better germination rates.

[Shule]

Then you've got Tresca and Fresca, which are supposed to be stable regular strawberries that you can grow from seed. I tried growing at least Tresca of those, too, but the Verticillium got them also. I think they're everbearing, but I'm not sure offhand.

[wykvlvr]

Then you've got Tresca and Fresca, which are supposed to be stable regular strawberries that you can grow from seed. I tried growing at least Tresca of those, too, but the Verticillium got them also. I think they're everbearing, but I'm not sure offhand.

Fresca is one of the seeds I bought today so it will be interesting to see how those work out. I was shocked at how few seeds are in most of the regular strawberry packages. Fresca has 20 and the Musk strawberries have 25 but some I was looking at only had 10. The Alpine varieties I bought have 50 to 75 seeds per packet. It will be interesting to see how many plants I actually end up with.

[Whwoz]

Aside from 4 or 5 different Aplines, which are not really to our liking in spite of their great taste, the only other strawberry seed readily available here is one called Temptation, fiddley little things to grow I must agree and not worth it incomparison to the Hokowases that I normally grow. If I can get these up from seed I may have a play at crossing them with some of the red/pink flowered ones for the hell of it. Some seed will also migrate for those whom want to try them.

[svalli]

Those Rainbow Treasure strawberries I grew 2022, were nice looking hanging basket plants but the berries were not what I expect from strawberries. I think that it is not just one variety, but mix of three different ones. The ones with darkest red flowers had oblong berries, which were quite tart and the ones with white flowers looked like regular strawberries and tasted best. I did replace them with new strawberries last year and started variety named Sweet Fresca from seeds.
Also the white alpine strawberries were disappointment, because it is hard to know when those are ripe.

This year I started Baron Solemacher alpines in January and have now 24 seedlings growing. I transplanted those to 4x4cm cells from my seed starting box which has 2cm diameter round cells. Sprouting was quite sporadic and I put new seeds into my seed starting box when there were empty cells and then the earlier ones started also to sprout and I moved the tiny seedlings with a toothpick to other empty cells. Week ago I transplanted the last ones from the 2cm cells to these 4x4cm cells and they have started to catch up with the earlier ones.

Alpine seedlings.jpg

We have wild Fragaria vesca growing on our yard, but those produce berries for shorter period than what these runnerless alpines should. The wild spread with runners and I use them as ground cover on a gravel slope next to my raised bed garden. They do keep spreading on the edges of the paths between my raised beds and would be easy to weed, but I do leave some of them because the berries are so intensely flavored. If anyone wants seeds for those, I can collect those this coming summer.

Wild strawberries.jpg

[bower]

I have read some discussion about breeding strawberries with red or pink flowers, and I believe it is accomplished by interspecies crosses with the Potentilla family. They are probably backcrossing with other strawberries to get fertile seed to sell for starting them. It's good to know that the taste is variable, I wondered about that.

I have some Baron Solemaher alpines as well! All of these have been transplanted now to 4 inch pots, but 4 to a pot to save space. At least the extra depth means I don't have to water as often. I still have a full 1020 tray of Reugen. The small cells are challenging at least with the peaty promix/compost mix I had this year, with the tendency to always be either too wet or too dry. Strawberry seedlings are way more sensitive and of course, slower growing, than tomatoes or peppers.

[Wildcat82]

I just found out Urban Farmer sells seeds for a Junebearing strawberry called "Giant." They claim they are "the largest on the market." As far as I know, this is the only variety of Junebearing seed you can buy.

https://www.ufseeds.com/product/giant-s ... /STGI.html

I remember reading somewhere on Tville where Carolyn Male said an heirloom strawberry like "Sparkle" should grow true from seed. On our farm we grew Sparkle and they were amazing. Does anyone here grow it - I'd love to give it a try.

[bower]

Somebody must be growing Sparkle. I just googled and there are tons of nurseries offering plants for sale that are in stock now. So it's widely grown and current I would say. No seeds on offer so you need a berry from somebody!