Strawberry season starts earlier than normal
TOWN OF OREGON, Wis. — Donna Laufenberg sat in a strawberry field under a bright sun on Carandale Farm Tuesday morning and bit into a Wendy that had nothing to do with fast food.
Wendy is the variety of strawberry that was ready for picking at Carandale, which opened its fields to customers Tuesday. It’s the earliest opening during the 44 years that Dale and Cindy Sechar have owned the place and another result of our unusually early and warm start to spring.
Other area strawberry farms like Upickstrawberryfarm in DeForest and Country Bumpkin Farm Market in Wisconsin Dells are also open to pickers, while most others are expected to open within a week. That’s important to know because the strawberry season lasts just three weeks and this one, helped by the warm temperatures last weekend, could be over before some past seasons have started.
“It was slow but steady today. I think the word just got out that we were open,” said Cindy Sechar, who added that the usual opening date is around mid-June. Their previous earliest opening day was June 2, and the latest was June 24.
Although a frosty April cut into the crop, early reviews from pickers and farmers indicate many of the more than a dozen variety of strawberries grown in the area are as juicy and tasty as ever.
“Overall, everybody is telling me that the berries look good. I would encourage people not to wait (to pick and buy them) because of the impact the weather can have on the season,” said Anna Maenner, the executive director of the Wisconsin Berry Growers Association.
Since the first strawberry plants of the spring blossomed so early, some farmers let them die in the frost and took steps to protect the later blossoms, which were greater in number, said Dave Lutz, owner of the Lutz Family Farm in Marshall. He plans to open his farm to pickers by Monday.
The Upickstrawberryfarm near DeForest lost 30 percent of its strawberry crop, according to owner Paul Snyder. Maenner said that is about the average percentage loss in this area this spring.
Farmers “frost-protect” their strawberry crop by irrigating the plants on cold nights. Ice that forms on the berries causes heat that protects the blossoms and the berries from the frost, Maenner explained.
“If they had frost-protected those earliest ones, we would have had some strawberries in early to mid-May,” Lutz said. “So we let those go with the hope that more blossoms would be coming, and they were. There is fruit coming. We’re optimistic for a good season.”
Strawberries are more susceptible to frost damage than fruit from trees because the plants are low to the ground where frost settles more easily. The odds get worse for fields in lower elevations. “Two farms located two miles from each other can have two totally different results,” Maenner said. “And a lot of it also depends on your frost protection.”
Dale Sechar said frost-protected strawberries can suffer in quality. “I think the biggest quality issue this year may be the size,” he added. “They are decent-sized right now, but we don’t know how much the later varieties will fill out.”
Laufenberg, of Albany, wasn’t complaining as she picked those Wendy strawberries in Sechar’s fields at Carandale. “We need more relaxing things to do like this,” she said, “and these strawberries sure are better than the store-bought ones, that’s for sure.”