Strawberry

STRAWBERRIES IN HISTORY

The 600 strawberry varieties found today stem from five or six original wild species.

The wild, small, fragrant forest strawberry of Europe was available to the Romans. 

Pixiebay

Ancient Romans used strawberries as medicine, believing they could cure fever, bad breath, gout, sore throats, depression, fainting and diseases of the blood.

The monks of Western Europe used the round-fruited, wild strawberry in their "illuminated" manuscripts.

The English and French used the beautiful heart-shaped berries to landscape their gardens. In fourteenth-century France, Charles V (The Wise) ordered twelve hundred strawberry plants to be grown in the Royal Gardens of the Louvre.

The alchemists considered the fruit to be an elixir for a long life. However, the strawberry did not enable Charles V to live an extended life. He died in 1380 aged 43.

In Bavaria, farmers harvested strawberries and tied small baskets of the fruit to the horns of their cows as an offering to the elves, who they believed helped the cows to make more milk.

The combination of strawberries and cream was first created by Thomas Wolsey in the court of King Henry VIII. 

Pixiebay

No one knows how strawberries got their name.

Native American Indians called strawberries "heart-seed berries" and pounded them into their traditional corn-meal bread.

Europeans came across wild strawberries in Virginia when their ships landed there in 1588, grown by local American Indians. Having discovered the great taste of the Native Americans bread, colonists decided to create their own version, which became Strawberry Shortcake.

When Virginia sent a better flavored, strawberry to England in 1642, and a large white strawberry from Chile was introduced in 1806, the big fruit we know today, emerged.

Michael Keens, a market gardener of Isleworth near London, exhibited the first cultivated strawberry that combined size, flavor, and color at the Royal Horticultural Society on July 3, 1806. Prior to this, wild strawberries and cultivated selections from wild strawberry species were the common source of the fruit.

Israeli farmer Ariel Chahi contacted Guinness World Records when he found an unusually large strawberry during harvest with an approximate height of 18 cm (7.09 in) and circumference of 34 cm (13.4 in). It was weighed on February 12, 2021 at a huge 289 g (10.19 oz) breaking the weight record for the heaviest ever strawberry. This strawberry is of the Ilan variety and was grown by Ariel’s family business "Strawberries in the Field" located in Kadima-Zoran, Israel.

FUN STRAWBERRY FACTS

Strawberries have more vitamin C than oranges. It takes seven or eight individual strawberries to equal the amount of vitamin C in one medium sized orange.

In order to grow, strawberries need as much as six hours of direct sunlight every day.

Every strawberry plant is hand-picked approximately every three days. This is the time it takes for strawberries to complete their cycle of turning from green to white to red.

Picking home-grown garden strawberries By Loadmaster (David R. Tribble)

Strawberry fragrance is almost as strong as a rose because the strawberry belongs to the genus Fragraria in the rose family. The name of the scientific classification was derived from the Old Latin word for fragrant. The modern Italian word for strawberry is still "Fragola."

Strawberries are the only fruit with seeds on the outside of their skin. There are about 200 dry, yellow seeds on each berry, each of which is actually considered a separate fruit.

Botanists don't classify strawberries as a true berry. That's because true berries, like blueberries and cranberries have seeds inside and not outside.

The largest strawberry-producing state in the US is California, which harvests 83% of the strawberries grown in the country on approximately 24,500 acres.

Strawberry field in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. By Dietmar Rabich

California produces one billion pounds of strawberries each year. If all the strawberries produced in California in one year were laid berry to berry, they'd wrap around the world 15 times.

Sources Food For Thought by Ed Pearce, Wellpict