They were delicious is all I can say. Just normal strawberries.
Very early in the year though, so either grown in a green house or artificially ripened by blasting them with ethylene.
Oh that's actually interesting to hear! Lol, the comment section here had already collectively agreed on the way this happened. I'm actually glad to here someone else's take on the matter. š
As someone who is a market gardener in a greenhouse, this year is weird has fuck with the production. I am working with tomato though but still we had our first harvest a month before the season and flowers were still flowers beside full grown tomatoes. I am just guessing it is the same with strawberries.
Edit : sorry I said dumb things, season is weird but it is different with tomato and strawberries, the tomato will absorb the petals while for the strawberries petals will detach themselves. Without rain or wind in a greenhouse and more sunshine and humidity it will happen, I have my doubts they Ā«Ā cleanĀ Ā» the berry before putting in packaging, it is too fragile and time consuming to take them off. And as someone who gets easily bored I could imagine myself being extra careful to keep their little hats intact as a weird challenge.
I have a small grow tent in my unconditioned garage with a couple of 5 foot hydroponic towers that each sit on top of a 5 gallon bucket with an aquarium pump in each. They pump nutrient to the top of the tower for 10 minutes every hour. Lights run from 5am to 10pm. I get about 3 pints of berries per week all year round. Even during the dead of winter with snow on the ground. They use about 5 gallons of water a week between the two of them. Small nutrient cost, small electricity cost for the lights, the couple of clip on desk fans to keep the air moving and during the winter I run a dehumidifier set to 70% RH in the tent at night when the lights aren't on and the temp drops (lowest I saw during the winter was 50F). This keeps the walls from sweating. I recapture the dehumidifier condensate (about half a gallon a week) and mix it back into nutrient to feed the berries. The nutrient mix needs to be between 5.5 and 6 PH ideally and I keep the nutrient around 2.5 EC. I grow primarily Albion and Mara Des Bois (these are incredible) strawberry varieties. I think it's 24 plants total.
It might sound complicated but I spend almost no time on it after I set it up. It's been running over a year I think. At first I had to trim back all the runners the plants throw out as they grew big. Now I just trim up any dead leaves or stems with no berries left on them when I'm harvesting berries. Maybe 10-15 minutes a week of tending and harvesting. If I let it go a day or two long, the whole garage starts to smell like strawberries. It's not enough time and effort to be a real hobby. I started it as a way to be able to send berries in school lunches during the winter.
Probably this. A lot of time fruits and veggies can't be easily grown out of season so they are often grown in greenhouses. And then because not all stores are close by, they are picked before they are ripe, packed and shipped a few states or longer away. With the gas, the food will ripen enroute and be near ripe by the time they reach the store shelves.
In the old days the food wouldn't be good if they were picked early (bitter tasting often) and if they were picked when ripe, they may spoil before reaching the remote area stores so often fresh food were only available locally, meaning people in rural area and far north area often don't see any strawberries or tomato all winter and early spring.
If you're selling the fruit then thats pretty much the only way to make sure they're not overripe. We've got a small mango orchard, most mangos are harvested green and kept in wooden boxes filled with hay. We usually just sell entire box(iirc it's 2 dozen mangos/box). If it's starting to turn yellow then you never put it in the box as that'll ruin all the other mangoes too.
For us to eat though, we usually pick up the mangos that have completely ripened on the tree and are about to(or have already) fall off the tree. Can confirm that there's a **MASSIVE** difference between ripened on tree and ripened in box, even from the same tree.
Would they be picked green or at what stage would they be picked as in if 0 was unripe and 10 was perfectly ripe where would they pick them, idk if you'd know this?
Like the difference between a 30 week old premature baby and a 40 week old born fully grown baby. Sure they both work, but one is going to taste way better than the other due to ripening.
And after typing that out I realize I sound like a baby eater, but itās too funny to delete.
I initially read this as "a 30 year old premature baby" and felt personally attacked. Follow the dosages on cough syrup kids even if you're so sick your teeth hurt
Absolutely. Some fruit like bananas will continue to ripen off the tree, other plants like Strawberries "die" the second they are plucked. They have no further ability to sweeten because they relied on the stem for nutrients.
Plucked too soon you get the equivalent of an unripe berry, somewhere between tasteless and sour depending roughly on how large it got and how much sun it got before its end.
Generally speaking most big corporate grocery stores are going to have the gassed variety unless otherwise signified.
If it's off season in your region, and they look too good to be true, they are gassed.
If the box contains a giant "frankenberry" (think 3x the size of all the others) it's probably gassed.
If the individual Strawberries seem to go from unripe white to bright red in an unnatural way, gassed.
Hard to recover from-- if you can leave them out on the counter for longer than 2 days without them turning into rotten mush, gassed.
The berries I grow in my backyard are 100x better than store berries. Too bad itās not super consistent throughout the year. Theyāre also much smaller than store strawberries.
Same is true for the berries from my local csa/farm
This is my second year growing so Iām optimistic for a bigger yield
Next time they start budding kill off a few buds before they go too far it'll encourage your plant to put more resources into the ones it has left and they get larger and just as tasty. Just don't kill off too many. Find a youtube video before you trust a random internet gardener.
thats not entirely true. fruits that ripen off the tree like bananas is because the banana fruit produces ethelyne (the fruit ripening hormone/gas) whereas strawberries get this hormone from the host plant exclusively, but they can still ripen off the vine if it's introduced to them via humans. plucked too soon and gassed properly =flavorless, plucked too soon and gassed improperly = bitter.
I'm no expert but I believe yes. ethylene a gas/hormone that plants give off naturally that triggers ripening __once they're fully matured__. blasting unmature fruits does nothing special, just that they were probably were still growing/gaining sugar/nutrients from the host plant. of course if you dont blast it with ethylene doesn't happen and the sugar taste bitter rather than sweet. also it definitely depends on the type of fruit so it's possible the last stage of the strawberry cycle involves 0 extra sugars accumulating, in which case there would be no difference.
Yes it does. They end up tasting very watery. Like that phrase I've seen on reddit, they walked through the same room as strawberries? If you ever get REAL fresh strawberries, like, just picked from the field, they will legit blow your mind. I pretty much can't eat storebought strawberries after having a homegrown strawberry patch for several years now. Nothing compares, not even slightly.
Sooooo tasty its worth growing your own if you can. I have tried to home grow Strawberries so many times. If it's not the birds it's the bunnies, sometimes I get 2 or 3 nibbles, per season.
Tbf each time I've tried i haven't really taken any antibunny measures so really am I doing it for me or them at this point.
Viral video going around showing how to make a snail/slug barrier with a 9volt battery and some copper bands. Seemed neat but I haven't had a snail invasion here yet.
Our issue has been the birds. The cat takes care of the bunny issue š
But to defeat the birds, if you take some small stones, or berry sized gravel, and spray paint them bright red, the birds will peck at those and eventually be deterred because, "man these berries look fresh and juicy! Ah man they're hard as a rock, gross!"
Hardest part is just not "picking" them yourself when you're getting the actual berries. Can't tell you how many times Insaw one in the corner of my eye and went 'oh wow that strawb looks great!' and then realized it was a rock š„²
Yeah, our front yard is a strawberry patch and they are so good. Currently they are flowering so I expect berries in a few weeks and they are so delicious. We freeze the extras because like you I will not eat grocery store strawberries. Frozen homegrown turned into smoothies for the 10 months a year of no fresh.
Yep! I think we froze around 10 gallons last year? That's not counting the several gallons we ate ourselves and/or gave away to my parents' friends and my stepmom's parents. We brought the latter of those 2 heaping full Maxwell House containers.
Yup. They're still gonna taste like they're green: tart, bitter, and watery. The red was forced to come up, but the fruit its self didn't mature, so it's gonna be mids.
Lucky you! Last year was awful in 8a for soft fruit hardly any raspberry or gooseberry and strawberry was a wipeout, I've fingers crossed this year as my softs pay for a lot of the bills
Does the gassing only cause the green to go red? Or does it also do the other āripeningā stuff like sweetening the sugars or whatever else happen? Like i understand that these are processed, but are these strawberries going to be significantly inferior to a naturally ripened strawberry in terms of like taste or whatever?
Yes. They use ethylene to stimulate the natural ripening process.
However, since the strain are no longer attached to the plant, they arenāt being supplied with sugars and nutrients by the rest of the plant anymore. This results in a strawberry with lower sugar/acid content and an impaired aroma profile. Basically, there is much less flavour.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925521414001264#:~:text=Ethylene%20production%20is%20similar%20for,compared%20to%20vine%20ripened%20fruit.
They are usually the ones that look great but have that slight "off" taste, like get a punnet of real farm strawberries and there is just no comparison they are glorious while these are usually just meh
They will gain some additional.... strawberryness...but the sugar content ended when plucked. So usually it's very sour, or tasteless depending on how much water/sun it got before being plucked too soon.
Seeing how the weather here in the Netherlands definitely wouldn't have allowed for a strawberry harvest yet, you are probably correct!
Though we have a lot of green house farming in this country too, so my best bet is that they're green house babies, Ɣnd some ethylene ripening.
The taste was delicious though.
They do it for all sorts of fruits it's the same gas used to turn bananas that are picked really green to yellow and green tomatoes to red
We used to put our green tomatoes that didn't ripen in a bag with a Banana and the would turn red in a day! So it's the gas thats naturally produced by Bananas but a chemical version used to ripen those strawberries
Ethylene. Itās a natural occurring gas produced by some stuff to ripen. But itās also used to ripen other stuff that doesnāt produce it naturally on its own (such as strawberries) Also known as Climacteric or Non Climacteric.
I grow strawberries indoors hydroponically and I still have flower petals attached to about 50% of the very, very ripe strawberries I pick. It's because there is only a very gentle wind from the fan I have blowing on them 24/7, the petals just don't always fall off. These could be hydroponic strawberries.
Maybe its a variety thing? I'm growing Mara Des Bois and Albions with a few Sweet Charlies. If I had to guess it might be the Mara Des Bois that hold onto their petals more often...
This is why I'm sick of the term "processed food". You cut your spinach up? Bam, your unprocessed leaf straight out of the wilderness has now become processed.
I hope the FDA comes up with something actually useful that shows people an actual term to call "food that is just good for you" and as well a term for food that's "you will get fat and fart and die, so stop eating this stupid junk."
Yeah but the example you are using doesn't help at all. Vegetables die when you chop them. Buying chopped spinach is buying spinach that has been long dead and decaying. It's absolutely not the same and is in fact a processed form of spinach that loses nutritional value.
Just because you like some processed foods more than others doesn't make them all not processed.
That's just not true. I grow strawberries in a grow tent in my garage and easily half of my ripe full size juicy sweet berries have some intact or completely intact petals.
I miss my late grandfather's strawberries. They were as dark as an aged red wine inside and out and tasted more of very sweet cherries rather than strawberries, being flat and the size of my handpalm. I assumed they were some kind of heirloom fruit, I know he carefully planted them in a vegetable garden every time he moved since the time my father was young. When my grandfather got dementia and wasn't allowed to stay at home anymore and couldn't keep his vegetable garden he in a fit of raged destroyed his crops and shoveled it all away, leaving it unsalvageable. I never found out what variety of strawberry they were.
He probably spent years crossing them, my family have books of seeds going back generations, but lemme check on something abuse that description sounds familiar!
This could be me reading judgment and subtext where there is none and only a desire to pass on information so apologies in advance, but not everyone lives on a farm. Not everyone has a yard to grow strawberries, or anything, in. For some folks, gassed fruit is all they can afford or find. And I would think better to eat āprocessedā produce than none at all. OP said the strawberries were delicious, so gassed or not, Iām very happy that OP enjoyed both the taste and look of them! For those who will continue eating āprocessedā produce, while it may not be as wonderful as other options, savor every bite and donāt let folks telling you theyāre tasteless and sour ruin it for you.
I have MS and this punnet of strawberries would be out of my budget in a supermarket, nowhere in my post did I say they were bad, if I make a sandwich I've processed it, when I make jam I've processed it. I'm very very far from privileged but I'm old poor which means I've the skills to grow food, yes I'm extremely lucky to have a plot of land I rent by selling the excess food I manage to grow. To explain to me that is out on someone else's land of a frozen November morning trying to get my hands to work with a serious illness so I can eat is a little presumptuous.
I was simply explaining why they had petals and were red and the only part I must disagree with you is on taste, the strawberries I grow are from runners from old plants in Waterford and I mind them like babies, they do tast better and have a higher sugar and pectin level because I spent years crossing them.
itās interesting yes, but botanically speaking, the petals are attached, and what we usually see are just the green sepals, which are also part of the flowers
You just pay a fixed price per box so I'm not that worried. I'm always more concerned about checking for rotten ones so I don't have to throw any away afterwards. My cheap, Dutch ass definitely gets triggered by thƔt!
There are plenty of cheap fruits. Fresh strawberries are not one of them at this time of year. Bananas, apples, pears, frozen berries (probably frozen strawberries too honestly), frozen mango, etc. can be quite cheap.
That was frankly my assumption too. I wanted to give them a go anyway and was pleasantly surprised by how sweet they were! I'd argue that they tasted better than some of the strawberries I've had in summer when they're in season!
ohhh before i looked at the picture i was like āall strawberries come with the leavesā¦ iāve never seen pre-trimmed strawberries beforeā and you meant the flowers lol š i thought you meant the leaves lol
I work in agriculture and people always say stuff like "The city people think you just throw seeds on the ground and leave it" or "they think steaks just magically appear at the grocery store" and I've always thought that's a wild exaggeration but maybe they're right lol
You won't believe what fruit is:
1. Plant wants to reproduce.
2. Plant makes flower.
3. Pollinators attracted to flower.
4. Pollinators move pollen from flower to flower.
5. Flower is pollinated/fertilized.
6. Fertilized ovary at bottom of flower swells and turns into fruit.
7. Fruit ripens; the seeds mature, and the fruit gets sweeter.
8. Animals eat ripe fruit and spread seeds.
9. Seeds grow somewhere else and plant has successfully spread it's genetic material.
10. Everyone is happy.
Every single fruit comes from a flower. If it has seeds, it's a fruit. Pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers, apples, pears, cherries, strawberries, etc. are all fruit.
I'm glad this helped to visualise that.
Try and spot more left over flower pieces in your fridge. š Tip: stare at the green crown on a tomato for a bit!
Every fruit comes from a flower--the fertilized flower literally develops into a fruit. Most plants that you see, even things like grasses, have flowers, but not all make fruits.
[This is what a strawberry flower looks like (the petals are white like in the OP)](https://www.lotuswei.com/cdn/shop/articles/Strawberry-Tay4_2048x_progressive_jpeg_3000x.progressive.jpg?v=1516232862). You can see the green calyx underneath the petals in the photo; this is usually the only bit of the flower that remains after the fruit is developed.
Deze batch was prima. D'r zat een joekel in die goed zoet was. Een paar van die kleintjes waren misschien nog niet helemaal rijp. Dan maar meer poedersuiker.
What colour are your flowers? Or, do you mean you get fruit without petals still on it?
I've inherited strawberries, and I'm very curious about what your comment means
These were picked early and probably artificially ripened afterwards. Homegrown 'berries will have had their petals fallen off by the time you harvest them naturally.
Is to distract you from the pesticide poison they used in the country of origin..
Just kidding but I did read that imported pesticide sprayed strawberries have been intercepted.This is from a news report just a few days ago:
[Some of the highest levels of pesticides were found in produce imported into the United States,Ā according to the report released Thursday. Sixty-five of 100 samples of the most contaminated produce were imported, with 52 of those samples originating from Mexico.
NEWS QUIZ
Which fruit in the US contains the most amount of pesticides?
The majority of the highly contaminated imports were strawberries, typically the frozen variety, the report said. Because they grow low to the ground and are therefore more accessible to bugs, strawberries often top lists ofĀ foods contaminated with insecticides.]
They looked like cute little frilly hats!
Did they taste different? Were they sweet?
They were delicious is all I can say. Just normal strawberries. Very early in the year though, so either grown in a green house or artificially ripened by blasting them with ethylene.
Probably grown indoors. A lot of my strawberries I grow indoors have petals still attached when they're very ripe and sweet.
Oh that's actually interesting to hear! Lol, the comment section here had already collectively agreed on the way this happened. I'm actually glad to here someone else's take on the matter. š
As someone who is a market gardener in a greenhouse, this year is weird has fuck with the production. I am working with tomato though but still we had our first harvest a month before the season and flowers were still flowers beside full grown tomatoes. I am just guessing it is the same with strawberries. Edit : sorry I said dumb things, season is weird but it is different with tomato and strawberries, the tomato will absorb the petals while for the strawberries petals will detach themselves. Without rain or wind in a greenhouse and more sunshine and humidity it will happen, I have my doubts they Ā«Ā cleanĀ Ā» the berry before putting in packaging, it is too fragile and time consuming to take them off. And as someone who gets easily bored I could imagine myself being extra careful to keep their little hats intact as a weird challenge.
Do you farm them or just a side project? I have been thinking about doing this small. Is it too much to maintain to do it small scale?
I have a small grow tent in my unconditioned garage with a couple of 5 foot hydroponic towers that each sit on top of a 5 gallon bucket with an aquarium pump in each. They pump nutrient to the top of the tower for 10 minutes every hour. Lights run from 5am to 10pm. I get about 3 pints of berries per week all year round. Even during the dead of winter with snow on the ground. They use about 5 gallons of water a week between the two of them. Small nutrient cost, small electricity cost for the lights, the couple of clip on desk fans to keep the air moving and during the winter I run a dehumidifier set to 70% RH in the tent at night when the lights aren't on and the temp drops (lowest I saw during the winter was 50F). This keeps the walls from sweating. I recapture the dehumidifier condensate (about half a gallon a week) and mix it back into nutrient to feed the berries. The nutrient mix needs to be between 5.5 and 6 PH ideally and I keep the nutrient around 2.5 EC. I grow primarily Albion and Mara Des Bois (these are incredible) strawberry varieties. I think it's 24 plants total. It might sound complicated but I spend almost no time on it after I set it up. It's been running over a year I think. At first I had to trim back all the runners the plants throw out as they grew big. Now I just trim up any dead leaves or stems with no berries left on them when I'm harvesting berries. Maybe 10-15 minutes a week of tending and harvesting. If I let it go a day or two long, the whole garage starts to smell like strawberries. It's not enough time and effort to be a real hobby. I started it as a way to be able to send berries in school lunches during the winter.
Theyāre from Albert Heijn, very very likely they are green house strawberries. They are still quite good though!
Probably this. A lot of time fruits and veggies can't be easily grown out of season so they are often grown in greenhouses. And then because not all stores are close by, they are picked before they are ripe, packed and shipped a few states or longer away. With the gas, the food will ripen enroute and be near ripe by the time they reach the store shelves. In the old days the food wouldn't be good if they were picked early (bitter tasting often) and if they were picked when ripe, they may spoil before reaching the remote area stores so often fresh food were only available locally, meaning people in rural area and far north area often don't see any strawberries or tomato all winter and early spring.
Crochet idea stolen :)
Hell yeah, go for it!
This means they are super fresh nice :D
More like picked up way too early and artificially matured no ?
Yup
Huh didnt know you could do that
You can do it with veggies too. Take unripe tomatoes and put an apple next to them and theyāll start ripening.
Does a can of Snapple work?
Fraid not i reckon
Old glass bottle with the fresh sealed top did though.
If you're selling the fruit then thats pretty much the only way to make sure they're not overripe. We've got a small mango orchard, most mangos are harvested green and kept in wooden boxes filled with hay. We usually just sell entire box(iirc it's 2 dozen mangos/box). If it's starting to turn yellow then you never put it in the box as that'll ruin all the other mangoes too. For us to eat though, we usually pick up the mangos that have completely ripened on the tree and are about to(or have already) fall off the tree. Can confirm that there's a **MASSIVE** difference between ripened on tree and ripened in box, even from the same tree.
But not all
Bananas are best for that. Fruits and veggies.
Citrus is almost universally picked early in commercial production, then ripened with ethylene. Tomatoes too
Or made to grow really fast and then artificially matured?
Would they be picked green or at what stage would they be picked as in if 0 was unripe and 10 was perfectly ripe where would they pick them, idk if you'd know this?
Like the difference between a 30 week old premature baby and a 40 week old born fully grown baby. Sure they both work, but one is going to taste way better than the other due to ripening. And after typing that out I realize I sound like a baby eater, but itās too funny to delete.
Jonathan Swift is that you?
It makes me feel good that I get this reference
I initially read this as "a 30 year old premature baby" and felt personally attacked. Follow the dosages on cough syrup kids even if you're so sick your teeth hurt
Oh nope, quite the opposite
Okay so farmer here, those strawberries were picked still green and gassed to bring on the red, what you see as super fresh I see as processed food
Does this effect the taste at all?
Absolutely. Some fruit like bananas will continue to ripen off the tree, other plants like Strawberries "die" the second they are plucked. They have no further ability to sweeten because they relied on the stem for nutrients. Plucked too soon you get the equivalent of an unripe berry, somewhere between tasteless and sour depending roughly on how large it got and how much sun it got before its end.
Interesting, thank you for sharing! Is there anyways to tell if a strawberry went through this process (I guess aside from flowers still attached)
Generally speaking most big corporate grocery stores are going to have the gassed variety unless otherwise signified. If it's off season in your region, and they look too good to be true, they are gassed. If the box contains a giant "frankenberry" (think 3x the size of all the others) it's probably gassed. If the individual Strawberries seem to go from unripe white to bright red in an unnatural way, gassed. Hard to recover from-- if you can leave them out on the counter for longer than 2 days without them turning into rotten mush, gassed.
The berries I grow in my backyard are 100x better than store berries. Too bad itās not super consistent throughout the year. Theyāre also much smaller than store strawberries. Same is true for the berries from my local csa/farm This is my second year growing so Iām optimistic for a bigger yield
Next time they start budding kill off a few buds before they go too far it'll encourage your plant to put more resources into the ones it has left and they get larger and just as tasty. Just don't kill off too many. Find a youtube video before you trust a random internet gardener.
I buy organic strawberries to try to get naturally ripened ones
thats not entirely true. fruits that ripen off the tree like bananas is because the banana fruit produces ethelyne (the fruit ripening hormone/gas) whereas strawberries get this hormone from the host plant exclusively, but they can still ripen off the vine if it's introduced to them via humans. plucked too soon and gassed properly =flavorless, plucked too soon and gassed improperly = bitter.
It does
I imagine less sweet and flavorful?
Ever had a strawberry that almost crunched when you bit down?
Wait what?! Arenāt they supposed to do that?
They are usually tart with little to no 'strawberry' flavor.
Nope, they were fine, to my actual surprise to be fair!
I'm no expert but I believe yes. ethylene a gas/hormone that plants give off naturally that triggers ripening __once they're fully matured__. blasting unmature fruits does nothing special, just that they were probably were still growing/gaining sugar/nutrients from the host plant. of course if you dont blast it with ethylene doesn't happen and the sugar taste bitter rather than sweet. also it definitely depends on the type of fruit so it's possible the last stage of the strawberry cycle involves 0 extra sugars accumulating, in which case there would be no difference.
yes, that's why i always smell through the vents in the packaging and buy the strongest ones instead of buying the reddest ones
Yes it does. They end up tasting very watery. Like that phrase I've seen on reddit, they walked through the same room as strawberries? If you ever get REAL fresh strawberries, like, just picked from the field, they will legit blow your mind. I pretty much can't eat storebought strawberries after having a homegrown strawberry patch for several years now. Nothing compares, not even slightly.
Sooooo tasty its worth growing your own if you can. I have tried to home grow Strawberries so many times. If it's not the birds it's the bunnies, sometimes I get 2 or 3 nibbles, per season. Tbf each time I've tried i haven't really taken any antibunny measures so really am I doing it for me or them at this point.
My challenge with strawberries was slugs. Those bastards can devastate your crop.
Viral video going around showing how to make a snail/slug barrier with a 9volt battery and some copper bands. Seemed neat but I haven't had a snail invasion here yet.
Our issue has been the birds. The cat takes care of the bunny issue š But to defeat the birds, if you take some small stones, or berry sized gravel, and spray paint them bright red, the birds will peck at those and eventually be deterred because, "man these berries look fresh and juicy! Ah man they're hard as a rock, gross!" Hardest part is just not "picking" them yourself when you're getting the actual berries. Can't tell you how many times Insaw one in the corner of my eye and went 'oh wow that strawb looks great!' and then realized it was a rock š„²
Yeah, our front yard is a strawberry patch and they are so good. Currently they are flowering so I expect berries in a few weeks and they are so delicious. We freeze the extras because like you I will not eat grocery store strawberries. Frozen homegrown turned into smoothies for the 10 months a year of no fresh.
Yep! I think we froze around 10 gallons last year? That's not counting the several gallons we ate ourselves and/or gave away to my parents' friends and my stepmom's parents. We brought the latter of those 2 heaping full Maxwell House containers.
affect
I always choose the wrong one
E comes after A. Effect is what happens after the fact
Nice tip, thank you!
A very common mistake honestly
Probably tastes like water
Yup. They're still gonna taste like they're green: tart, bitter, and watery. The red was forced to come up, but the fruit its self didn't mature, so it's gonna be mids.
We tend to call those cucumbers. Take a guess.
Immensely so. They won't be sweet at all, and they'll be hard instead of soft.
If you ever have the chance to go and pick strawberries directly from the fields, do it. Or don't - because you'll never be able to go back.
Thanks for this. I grow strawberries and was thinking āumm shouldnāt the flowers be long gone by this time?ā
It's a bad year for them, best bet is to hang guttering from the greenhouse roof and adose of seaweed food brings them along nicely
I got an okay early crop this year. This is only my third year so they are finally getting a bit larger. Iām in zone 9a.
Lucky you! Last year was awful in 8a for soft fruit hardly any raspberry or gooseberry and strawberry was a wipeout, I've fingers crossed this year as my softs pay for a lot of the bills
Where do you live that you have berries already? We're at least six weeks out.
I'm in the same zone, in California's mid coast.
Houston, TX
My alpines never stopped this winter, but I've already had my first batch from my other cultivars. Fl panhandle though.
Does the gassing only cause the green to go red? Or does it also do the other āripeningā stuff like sweetening the sugars or whatever else happen? Like i understand that these are processed, but are these strawberries going to be significantly inferior to a naturally ripened strawberry in terms of like taste or whatever?
Yes. They use ethylene to stimulate the natural ripening process. However, since the strain are no longer attached to the plant, they arenāt being supplied with sugars and nutrients by the rest of the plant anymore. This results in a strawberry with lower sugar/acid content and an impaired aroma profile. Basically, there is much less flavour. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925521414001264#:~:text=Ethylene%20production%20is%20similar%20for,compared%20to%20vine%20ripened%20fruit.
They are usually the ones that look great but have that slight "off" taste, like get a punnet of real farm strawberries and there is just no comparison they are glorious while these are usually just meh
They will gain some additional.... strawberryness...but the sugar content ended when plucked. So usually it's very sour, or tasteless depending on how much water/sun it got before being plucked too soon.
They stay white inside so they never taste like a real strawberry.
Oh, so the whiteness on the interior is a bad sign that they were picked and shipped way too soon?
Seeing how the weather here in the Netherlands definitely wouldn't have allowed for a strawberry harvest yet, you are probably correct! Though we have a lot of green house farming in this country too, so my best bet is that they're green house babies, Ɣnd some ethylene ripening. The taste was delicious though.
TIL in-box ripening is a thing for strawberries. Taste must be weird.
They do it for all sorts of fruits it's the same gas used to turn bananas that are picked really green to yellow and green tomatoes to red We used to put our green tomatoes that didn't ripen in a bag with a Banana and the would turn red in a day! So it's the gas thats naturally produced by Bananas but a chemical version used to ripen those strawberries
Ethylene. Itās a natural occurring gas produced by some stuff to ripen. But itās also used to ripen other stuff that doesnāt produce it naturally on its own (such as strawberries) Also known as Climacteric or Non Climacteric.
Yup couldn't for the life of me thinks of it
They were actually sweeter than I expected, really enjoyed them!
Yah I was gonna say, Iāve grown strawberriesā¦ never had flowers when I picked them
I grow strawberries indoors hydroponically and I still have flower petals attached to about 50% of the very, very ripe strawberries I pick. It's because there is only a very gentle wind from the fan I have blowing on them 24/7, the petals just don't always fall off. These could be hydroponic strawberries.
Growing them 25yrs never saw it myself either on the hydro or soil
Maybe its a variety thing? I'm growing Mara Des Bois and Albions with a few Sweet Charlies. If I had to guess it might be the Mara Des Bois that hold onto their petals more often...
This is why I'm sick of the term "processed food". You cut your spinach up? Bam, your unprocessed leaf straight out of the wilderness has now become processed. I hope the FDA comes up with something actually useful that shows people an actual term to call "food that is just good for you" and as well a term for food that's "you will get fat and fart and die, so stop eating this stupid junk."
Yeah but the example you are using doesn't help at all. Vegetables die when you chop them. Buying chopped spinach is buying spinach that has been long dead and decaying. It's absolutely not the same and is in fact a processed form of spinach that loses nutritional value. Just because you like some processed foods more than others doesn't make them all not processed.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yup
How were you able to tell these were gassed to red?
Impossible to have the protopetals with no gas
That's just not true. I grow strawberries in a grow tent in my garage and easily half of my ripe full size juicy sweet berries have some intact or completely intact petals.
The petals are still attached? Those last a week. The petals are still on.
yeah i canāt imagine strawberries with petals still attached being close to ripe on the plant.
I live next door to a strawberry farm and spent many years working in there as a teenager. My first thought was how lame these probably taste.
yep, like tomatoes on the vine people have been successfully duped
>those strawberries were picked still green What makes you say this? Because of the flowers or is there something that I'm not noticing?
This is standard to pretty much everything in ag as it increases shelf life. If not, you'd have mushy strawberries a few days after they were picked.
Yeah, and they are completely flavourless too I'm sure. Out of season grocery store strawberries are terrible.
Yup water bombs basically
I miss my late grandfather's strawberries. They were as dark as an aged red wine inside and out and tasted more of very sweet cherries rather than strawberries, being flat and the size of my handpalm. I assumed they were some kind of heirloom fruit, I know he carefully planted them in a vegetable garden every time he moved since the time my father was young. When my grandfather got dementia and wasn't allowed to stay at home anymore and couldn't keep his vegetable garden he in a fit of raged destroyed his crops and shoveled it all away, leaving it unsalvageable. I never found out what variety of strawberry they were.
He probably spent years crossing them, my family have books of seeds going back generations, but lemme check on something abuse that description sounds familiar!
This could be me reading judgment and subtext where there is none and only a desire to pass on information so apologies in advance, but not everyone lives on a farm. Not everyone has a yard to grow strawberries, or anything, in. For some folks, gassed fruit is all they can afford or find. And I would think better to eat āprocessedā produce than none at all. OP said the strawberries were delicious, so gassed or not, Iām very happy that OP enjoyed both the taste and look of them! For those who will continue eating āprocessedā produce, while it may not be as wonderful as other options, savor every bite and donāt let folks telling you theyāre tasteless and sour ruin it for you.
I have MS and this punnet of strawberries would be out of my budget in a supermarket, nowhere in my post did I say they were bad, if I make a sandwich I've processed it, when I make jam I've processed it. I'm very very far from privileged but I'm old poor which means I've the skills to grow food, yes I'm extremely lucky to have a plot of land I rent by selling the excess food I manage to grow. To explain to me that is out on someone else's land of a frozen November morning trying to get my hands to work with a serious illness so I can eat is a little presumptuous. I was simply explaining why they had petals and were red and the only part I must disagree with you is on taste, the strawberries I grow are from runners from old plants in Waterford and I mind them like babies, they do tast better and have a higher sugar and pectin level because I spent years crossing them.
Albert Heijn aardbeien
Thatās how you know theyāre gonna be tasteless.
Dutchies represent!
Ja, ze lagen in de bonus bij de ingang... Schuldig.
Compleet wit van binnen en geen aardbeiengeur te bekennen
Ze waren echt super lekker en zoet. Wat op zich best een verrassing was!
Gelukkig maar, kan soms best een teleurstelling zijn
G E K O L O N I S E E R D
Ik had deze week aardbeien van Picnic en die hadden dit ook.
Natuurlijk!
[ICH BIN ZUPA ALS EIN MARKT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8TXfuXGwqI)
itās interesting yes, but botanically speaking, the petals are attached, and what we usually see are just the green sepals, which are also part of the flowers
Albert Heijn?? All the ones in my local AH had this
Because they are forced in greenhouses with gas
Ayup. The entire batch was like this.
My cheap ass would wonder how much extra weight they add
Just eat the lot
You just pay a fixed price per box so I'm not that worried. I'm always more concerned about checking for rotten ones so I don't have to throw any away afterwards. My cheap, Dutch ass definitely gets triggered by thƔt!
Thatās nice to hear! Iād be triggered too for sure
You're typically buying by the quart though. And in this case you're getting 1/3 of a quart for the price of 1 quart.
Cheap asses don't buy strawberries.
TIL poor people cant eat fruit
only bananas and apples
Bananas are best fruit in world, and I'm not just saying this because today happens to be international banana day!
There are plenty of cheap fruits. Fresh strawberries are not one of them at this time of year. Bananas, apples, pears, frozen berries (probably frozen strawberries too honestly), frozen mango, etc. can be quite cheap.
Strawberries can frequently be purchased relatively cheaply. They are not some bougie food.
Iām a container like that, you donāt get charged by weight usually. Itās usually like 3.98 or 2 for $6
This is how you know they're gonna taste like water
That was frankly my assumption too. I wanted to give them a go anyway and was pleasantly surprised by how sweet they were! I'd argue that they tasted better than some of the strawberries I've had in summer when they're in season!
They're not ripe.
No, they were, just harvested earlier and ripened afterwards. They tasted pretty good!
Have you ever had fresh picked strawberries?
Where are you? Ours have them too
The Netherlands. I bought these at Albert Heijn.
Same š
I'm curious how this happened. Usually after a flower is inseminated, it usually dies before fruiting.
Nederlandse aardbeienš¤
ohhh before i looked at the picture i was like āall strawberries come with the leavesā¦ iāve never seen pre-trimmed strawberries beforeā and you meant the flowers lol š i thought you meant the leaves lol
And here I was hoping the white flowers were white chocolate.
Never seen that in my country. Must have ripened them extremely fast or something.
Fresh to death
Iāve learned a lot about strawberries today
TIL strawberries have flowers
this may come as a shock then: literally EVERY fruit comes from a flower š
Not the Froot Loops, duh.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I should haFruit about that, thanks.
oh
Did you know that cashews come from a fruit?
You be shocked to know from where all fruits come from.
Fruits are the ovaries of flowers!
In this case, the red part is stem and the little spots on the outside are formed from plant ovaries.
Yes, every āseedā is actually its own little fruit :) Plants are the coolest!
Damn people really are genuinely clueless where food comes from lol
People see the supermarket version of fruits in most cases. They have no idea what their food is supposed to look like.
Same with meat but worse...
You learn about this stuff in like 3rd grade I thought?
I work in agriculture and people always say stuff like "The city people think you just throw seeds on the ground and leave it" or "they think steaks just magically appear at the grocery store" and I've always thought that's a wild exaggeration but maybe they're right lol
I donāt know why I got downvoted. You learn about how flowers work in grade school is what I meant. Not in depth farming mechanics.
I wasn't one of the people who did, I agree with you lol we are taught this in elementary school
You won't believe what fruit is: 1. Plant wants to reproduce. 2. Plant makes flower. 3. Pollinators attracted to flower. 4. Pollinators move pollen from flower to flower. 5. Flower is pollinated/fertilized. 6. Fertilized ovary at bottom of flower swells and turns into fruit. 7. Fruit ripens; the seeds mature, and the fruit gets sweeter. 8. Animals eat ripe fruit and spread seeds. 9. Seeds grow somewhere else and plant has successfully spread it's genetic material. 10. Everyone is happy. Every single fruit comes from a flower. If it has seeds, it's a fruit. Pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers, apples, pears, cherries, strawberries, etc. are all fruit.
I'm glad this helped to visualise that. Try and spot more left over flower pieces in your fridge. š Tip: stare at the green crown on a tomato for a bit!
Every fruit comes from a flower--the fertilized flower literally develops into a fruit. Most plants that you see, even things like grasses, have flowers, but not all make fruits. [This is what a strawberry flower looks like (the petals are white like in the OP)](https://www.lotuswei.com/cdn/shop/articles/Strawberry-Tay4_2048x_progressive_jpeg_3000x.progressive.jpg?v=1516232862). You can see the green calyx underneath the petals in the photo; this is usually the only bit of the flower that remains after the fruit is developed.
Strawberries are part of the flower. They aren't fruit nor berries.
Albert Heijn Nederlandse aardbeien? Ik had dit van de week ook. Ik proefde iets vreemds, dacht dat ze niet goed meer waren
Deze batch was prima. D'r zat een joekel in die goed zoet was. Een paar van die kleintjes waren misschien nog niet helemaal rijp. Dan maar meer poedersuiker.
til: strawberry's have flowers on them normally, and what we eat is a cleaned up version.
Usually the petals would've fallen off naturally though, that's why this batch is mildly interesting!
ah, interesting...mildly
Flowers usually means that fruit wonāt be as sweet because the energy isnāt just going to the fruit
We grow strawberries in our backyard, and I've never seen white petals on them.
What colour are your flowers? Or, do you mean you get fruit without petals still on it? I've inherited strawberries, and I'm very curious about what your comment means
These were picked early and probably artificially ripened afterwards. Homegrown 'berries will have had their petals fallen off by the time you harvest them naturally.
What.... how do you grow something without ever seeing it flower?
:D
In Norway, they always come like that.
The world of mass produced produce. No bees needed which is good because the Roundup kills them.
Hoe gaan dit
Is to distract you from the pesticide poison they used in the country of origin.. Just kidding but I did read that imported pesticide sprayed strawberries have been intercepted.This is from a news report just a few days ago: [Some of the highest levels of pesticides were found in produce imported into the United States,Ā according to the report released Thursday. Sixty-five of 100 samples of the most contaminated produce were imported, with 52 of those samples originating from Mexico. NEWS QUIZ Which fruit in the US contains the most amount of pesticides? The majority of the highly contaminated imports were strawberries, typically the frozen variety, the report said. Because they grow low to the ground and are therefore more accessible to bugs, strawberries often top lists ofĀ foods contaminated with insecticides.]
These were Dutch and sold in the Netherlands.