I have a very disappointing update to share for everyone today. It's been a little while since I took these pictures because I was a bit discouraged by this years results so allow me to explain.

All of my hybrids that are identified as currently flowering produced a substantial volume of flowers. At least 3 maybe 4 if I recall were producing perfect flowers during the initial stages. However, the majority of flowers i was able to observe at initial opening appeared very noticeably female (perhaps just very very small anthers) and combined with extremely consistent rain we did not get good pollination at all. This year I have been avoiding manual pollination wherever possible to reduce the workload when im not at work so I only ended up getting 2 berries this year, one from each of the two main plants that have been the primary producers from previous years.

This was a very poor year to leave them to nature but I think im still planning on going forward with thinning out my plants, I still have probably a dozen or so that never have flowered that im planning to remove this summer when I start cleaning things up. I plan to take these two specific specimens and put them in their own larger pots or potentially even put them in the ground to ensure some healthy strong growth before winter.

As to the fruit itself. General flavor is much the same as last year, picture one was a bit less juicy, the second pictured one had much more water content and also a bit more sour. Aesthetically the pictures absolutely so not do them justice as the way the light reflects off of them and the visual texture is just amazing. Picture one fruit much more closely resembles the female parent as well as modern strawberries, whereas picture two much more closely resembles the male parent which has much more deeply embedded seeds and a slightly less glossy finish which just looks so unique to me, it is definitely my preferred of the two and its most certainly my bias but I do hope to see it continue to improve.

I could always attempt to cross these two in the next generation as well. Im not entirely sure where to go from here though in terms of breeding them as to my understanding the F.Virginiana line is not true to type, so breeding from the perspective of developing a stable variety is out of the question.

I did come into possession of a new third specimen of F.Virginiana from down south past Eugene Oregon up in the mountains that I thought looked intriguing, but I did not get flowers this spring so I won't know whether its even worth attempting to work with for at least another year.

Wild strawberry hybrid project update: 17