Sparkle strawberries
Last spring, we planted
some Sparkle strawberries to replace the late-season variety we hated
(Allstar), which in turn had replaced the mediocre late-season variety
Jewel. Time for a rundown on the pros and cons of this new type of
strawberry!
As you can see from the photo above, one of the major advantages of Sparkle is that the plants are very
productive. I grow strawberries in the hill system, removing all
runners and giving the plants plenty of space, so I always get lots of
big berries from each plant. But our Sparkle planting takes the
cake in terms of pure quantity of fruit! (The plants produced just
as many runners as berries, though, so if you hate plucking runners,
this might not be the variety for you.)
Taste is another major
advantage. Sparkle is one of the sweetest strawberries I've ever
tasted, and although it lacks the fuller-bodied flavor of Honeoye, it
compares favorably with Ozark Beauty. (You can read more about flavor of the strawberry varieties we've tried here.) Mark says he likes Sparkle even better than our other varieties, while I rank it on the same level.
Where did the Sparkle
berries fail? Well, the plants don't really seem to be a
late-season variety, despite being listed as such on Nourse Farms
website. The Sparkles are ripening up in the mid-season, just a
hair behind the first Ozark Beauties, which means that the variety won't
extend our strawberry season as late into the summer as I'd
hoped. (Actually, as I go look at Nourse Farms' site, I see that
Sparkle is now listed as "late midseason" instead of "late
season." Not sure if they changed the site or if I just made a
mistake when researching.) Maybe next year I'll consider adding
another variety that is a truly late-producer.
Less importantly (at
least to me), Sparkle berries are so soft and luscious that it's hard to
even pick them off the vine without damaging the berries. I guess
that's really only a disadvantage to Mark since I often eat damaged
berries as I pick rather than risking them going bad during the two
minute journey into the house. Gotta protect those berries....
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Just wanted to say Hi. I am finally caught up after reading all your archives over the last six months or so. Really great collection of information you've got here. Keep up the good work.
Drew --- Thanks for reading!
Stephen --- I actually cover some of that in Weekend Homesteader: February, but it probably could benefit from being its own ebook. One of these days! My list of ebooks to get written always seems to get longer rather than shorter.
(Also, I'm glad to hear my strawberry obsession is enjoyed rather than annoying....)
As it turns out, the other variety we currently have is Earliglow, not seascape (we ripped that one out last year due to productivity issues and replaced with the earliglow this year...I had it backwards...whoops!...good thing for good records! ).
I too will be interested in the ease of picking on such a large scale. I actually ordered 250 earliglow (for CSA members), and 25 sparkle for my personal collection. However, the person filling the order accidently sent 250 of each! I'm not one to waste, so we found an additional 500 ft of garden row to plant the extras. Hopefully our drier climate and well draining soil will firm the berries up a bit. Here's to hoping, anyway. I also have a few Italian Alpine that I started from seed 2 years ago that should produce this year as well. I'll shoot you an email with my thoughts of each after tasting.