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If you know the right grower, yes, you can get summer strawberries
Strawberries are the first popular cultivated fruits to hit Chicago region farmers markets in the spring. The length of their season can be a blink of an eye in years of tough weather conditions. But even in friendly springs like this year, in which the season ran for a few weeks, strawberry lovers lament their disappearance from the markets by sometime in June.
But there are a handful of regional growers that come to the rescue, usually by late summer, with a variety known as everbearing strawberries. Mick Klug Farms of St. Joseph, Michigan is one of the leading area fruit farming operations, and it was from them that I first heard of everbearing strawberries not all that long ago. And it was from them that I bought my first pint of the year this past Saturday (August 17) at Chicago's Green City Market.
According to a nice concise description on the Tasting Table site, "everbearing" is a bit of a misnomer:
Everbearing strawberries don't produce strawberries continuously; rather, they typically produce two crops each year, one roughly in July and the second in August–September. This type of plant might sound ideal. After all, why settle for only one crop of fruit in June when you can get two crops later in the year? Plus, the delayed fruiting time does mitigate the risk of a killing frost.
While the double harvest, and the delayed harvest, are indeed often benefits with everbearing varieties, this type of strawberry does come with some drawbacks worth considering. In general, an everbearing strawberry plant will not produce strawberries as big and rich as you'll get with a June-bearing variety. That doesn't mean they aren't tasty — varieties like Fort Laramie and Ogallala are indeed quality producers. But you might not get the same, picture-perfect strawberries you'll get with a June harvest.
To read Tasting Table's full article about 15 varieties of strawberries, click the button below.
So what do you do with everbearing strawberries? The same things you do with any other kind of strawberry. Eat them out of hand, use them in cooking and baking, make preserves, add them for a sweet touch in salads, and on and on. While there may be some difference in size and flavor compared to the spring strawberries that we're used to, I don't think it's appreciable enough for most of us to notice.
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