View a slideshow from 2016’s Festival.
The Santa Maria Valley Strawberry Festival is a celebration of one of this area’s most abundant fruits, but have you ever wondered how the strawberries we eat at the event or buy from some local stands turn out to be so sweet and perfect? There is a process, and it’s not as easy as you might think.
Cultivating strawberries for human consumption goes back centuries, if not longer. Other than for food, late horticulturist George Darrow cited several uses for the strawberry throughout human history, including for medicine and even as inspiration for medieval religious art.
Then humans began growing strawberries in their gardens and they really took off.
According to the California Strawberry Commission, California grows 90 percent of all strawberries in the U.S. The ones we ultimately find and buy from a supermarket or a farmer’s stand are developed through a process of genetic selection.
In other words, the fruits with desired traits are kept and multiplied, while the undesired ones are not. Strawberries can be propagated by seed, although farmers prefer to simply clone a high-producing plant.
It may sound simple, but there’s some technology involved. More than likely, the strawberries you eat can trace their origins to a microscopic part of the the fruit’s stem. They’re then grown in a petri dish and placed into a new plant.
This new plant is then cloned dozens of times into what are called “runners.” Those plants are carefully grown in greenhouses then shipped up to the California-Oregon border where they’re grown in the cooler weather, which strengthens them for production.
It’s a cycle of repetition as explained by Daren Gee from Darensberries in Santa Maria.
“Then they plant those [the runners], and take the daughters off that one, and do it again and again,” Gee told NPR back in 2012.
Then the cloned strawberries are sent back to growers such as Gee and produce the eye-popping fruit that we crave so much.
Staff Writer David Minsky can be reached at dminsky@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 5, 2016.
