STRAWBERRY | How Does it Grow?

thanks to noom for sponsoring this episode this is america's most popular berry we eat more strawberries than blueberries and raspberries combined strawberries used to be a seasonal treat a taste of summertime bliss summer has a special taste the taste of strawberries but now we eat them all year round how did this fruit become such a monster hit tear gas and flame retardant seriously tear gas and flame retardant [Music] we've been eating strawberries for thousands of years but for most of that time the fruit was the itty bitty kind you still find growing in the wild the big luscious strawberry that we eat today was a complete accident it was born in a greenhouse at the royal palace of versailles sometime in the 18th century when a strawberry plant from virginia was inadvertently cross-bred with a strawberry plant from chile yep a north american strawberry met a south american strawberry in europe's grandest court how's that for a love story so this new strawberry fragaria ananasa was large like its chilean parent ruby red like its virginian one and fragrant like a pineapple which is where the name comes from ananas is french for pineapple this variety became the strawberry in europe and eventually made its way back to the americas where for centuries it was considered an ephemeral delicacy ripe and red and strawberry sweet so right about now you're saying nicole this origin story is great but you said tear gas and flame retardant what about that okay here's the deal it's the 1950s and the strawberry industry is about to be transformed beyond all recognition farmers already knew that strawberries loved california's sandy coastal soils and mild climate but up until this period they only had varieties that would fruit once or twice in a summer new varieties were developed known as day neutrals because they no longer needed long daylight hours to trigger fruiting instead day neutrals produced fruit continuously all season long and then something else came along that allowed farmers to stop rotating crops and go all in on strawberries and that's where the tear gas and flame retardant comes in okay so crop rotation is an ancient technique for managing pests and soil disease it's been around forever because it works but it's not the most cost effective way to farm it means you plant your big cash crop one year like strawberries and then the next year you plant something like a legume not typically a cash crop but it allows the soil to recover and the pest pressure to recede but what if you didn't have to worry about disease or insects or even weeds at all then you could plant strawberries year after year without ever stopping and what if you could supercharge your yield by 20 or even 30-fold well those miracles came to pass when scientists started playing around with leftover chemicals [Music] from world war ii and they discovered a way to kill every living thing in the soil not just bugs and weeds but also a disease known as verticillium wilt the strawberry's number one threat in california [Music] what they used specifically was a cocktail of chloropicrin and methyl bromide that's the tear gas and flame retardant together these chemicals became the two secret weapons of the strawberry's success injecting the soil with chemicals is called fumigation and by the 1960s fumigating with chloropicrin and methyl bromide became standard practice among californian farmers who today grow 90 percent of the nation's strawberries around 2017 farmers finally stopped using methyl bromide because it was finally banned they still use chloropicrin and other chemicals because like all cash crops yield is king and without the crutch of fumigation california's strawberry industry could never sustain its supernatural yields but remember this is tear gas the stuff that burns your eyes and attacks your lungs it's toxic to anyone exposed to it like nearby residents and farm workers and yes chloropicrin kills fungal pathogens but also every good thing in the soil too like the millions of beneficial microorganisms that support our entire ecosystem there are farmers who don't fumigate the soil and those outside california have had to experiment and innovate on their own because all the research on strawberries has focused on the big cash cow in california with its perfect climate and its fumigated soil these non-fumigating growers represent a tiny percentage of the industry i tracked down one of them and his strawberries made me rethink everything i ever knew about these berries hang on i have a quick question for you do you categorize the food you eat by good foods and bad foods well what if i told you that that's the wrong question that eating healthfully is more about mindfulness balance and practice not sacrifice creating a healthy relationship with food all starts up here that's why i was excited that noon reached out to me to sponsor this episode noom is a new way to get healthy it's a program based on real world psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy that teaches you how your mind works when it comes to food and helps you learn the why behind the decisions you make so it's not about dieting it's about learning to make good choices that add up to a healthier lifestyle you can actually sustain with noon you get daily lessons and activities plus access to real live health coaches it's quick and easy to create a custom plan where you can spend just 5 to 10 minutes per day i've got a link in the description below click it to get your free new evaluation now strawberries [Music] norm schultz has been on a decades-long quest to grow the best tasting strawberries he's been growing them on the eastern seaboard for nearly 40 years and farming them here at lim villa orchards in media pennsylvania for more than 20. unlike in california norm has to battle with early spring frosts humid hundred degree summers long periods of heavy rain and still he manages to grow four different kinds of picture-perfect strawberries that he and his crew harvest at the peak of ripeness from may all the way through to first frost sometimes as late as november [Music] our philosophies never about yield first you know it's flavor color look texture first like all strawberry growers norm gets his baby plants from specialist nurseries to combat pests and pathogens he plays the long game so the year before planting he prepares his strawberry fields with copious amounts of compost he also plants a cover crop often rye whose roots help loosen the soil the following february he plows it under the earth and starts planting his strawberries in early spring now strawberries are perennial meaning the plants come back year after year but farmers who rely on fumigation treat them like annuals after harvest the plants are plowed and the soil gassed and they start again here at lim villa norm keeps his strawberries as perennials when he does finally decommission a field because the plants are older and not producing as well or he wants to plant new varieties he will rotate in another crop for five to ten years before he plants strawberries on the same plot again i farmed in new england for 12 years and we would fumigate with methyl bromide weedless environment but then we saw diseases became an issue red steel it would kill all the good things in the soil that would combat the problem pathogens so i was using all different herbicides fighting the weeds the more herbicides i used the weaker the plant became and the less herbicides i used the more hand weeding i had to do under here this straw there's plastic under here and this whole field is 100 percent nursery fabric so now when you plant the plant all you have to weed is around just the tiny space a little hole you know less than one percent of the field the plastic also keeps the strawberry roots warm in the colder months but norm has to be careful not to cook his plants either at the height of summer the plastic traps the intense heat so he cools everything down by adding a layer of straw and that straw comes straight from limb villa [Music] [Music] as a strawberry plant grows it sends out runners horizontal stems that run above ground each runner produces a new baby plant a clone that will set its own roots but norm doesn't want new plants crowding out and competing with the ones he's already planted plus he doesn't want the mother plant spending energy growing new plants in place of fruit so his crew sweeps the field to pick off the runners so each hand is working each hand's working as fast as possible fast as possible so hand hand over hand because all this is just money being spent and no revenue being made yes and this is quite literally back breaking work you're just bent over the whole time then over the yeah the secrets not to kneel down it's all at the knees yeah [Music] for some varieties norm's crew also pinches off the first flowers giving the plant more time to establish itself and produce bigger better berries okay now's a good time to break down the anatomy of a strawberry strawberries are not true berries and for that matter what we think of as the fruit is not the fruit at all the red part is actually a swollen piece of the plant's stem called the receptacle and what we think of as the seeds are actually the fruits they're called aquines and each of these 200 or soakings on a strawberry contain a seed and makes a lot more sense when you look at the flower each strawberry flower contains both male and female parts wind bees and other pollinators do a fine job spreading the pollen from the male stamens to the female pistols if properly pollinated each one of these pistols will turn into an akin a fruit with a seed [Music] but sometimes not all the pistols get enough pollen and you get a berry that looks like this not the classic heart shape right still delicious of course at linn villa norm's crew harvests strawberries the delicate way by pinching the berries off by the stems so they don't bruise the fruit with their fingers because the strawberries are really that ripe [Music] a good harvest for norm is 5 000 pounds per acre that's a huge victory for a farm in the mid-atlantic region but small fry compared to california where farms average 20 000 pounds per acre [Music] but here's the bigger and i would argue the most critical difference quality so in california this is how they pick them weight at the tip the color breaking all the way around this will ship but once you remove it from the plant the sugar just stops so this variety is chandler this is the exact variety that was the industry standard for california for years but california never lets it get read to the tip you can see it's red all the way all the way through oh my god you don't know what you're missing guys it's incredible [Music] seriously no joke once you've had strawberries locally grown picked at the peak of ripeness from varieties bread for flavor you won't finally know what a strawberry is supposed to taste like unlike those hard tasteless golf balls that get shipped to our grocery store which leads me to wonder what if we made strawberries a seasonal treat again what if we as consumers all decided that we didn't want to eat tasteless strawberries all year round and instead we would be willing to wait until strawberries were in season locally able to be picked at the peak of ripeness hey strawberries are grown in all 50 states it's not an impossible dream [Music] you

Channel: TRUE FOOD TV

Views: 250,974

Keywords: strawberry history, soil fumigation, soil fumigation chemicals, methyl bromide, chloropicrin, how to grow strawberries, california strawberry industry, strawberry farming, how do strawberries grow, are strawberries berries, achenes, strawberry seeds are the fruit, norm schultz, linvilla orchards, nicole jolly, food history, agricultural literacy, agriculture education, organic strawberry growing, pesticide-free strawberries, world war II chemicals in farming

Id: 0V1vPC2ir4Y

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021