There’s nothing like a locally grown organic strawberry, but you can’t get them at most grocery stores.
On the East Coast right now, Mom’s Organic Market is selling organic strawberries from the Lancaster Farm Fresh Co-op, an organic co-op of over 100 small farms.
It used to be really hard to find truly organic strawberry plants. Organic strawberry growers would purchase their annual plant stock from conventional plant nurseries that used synthetic chemicals for pre-plant soil fumigation. Now, there are farms like the Innovative Organic Nursery committed to making organically grown bare-root strawberry starts available. Where you buy plants, ask if they’re getting their strawberry starts from a certified organic nursery. The Berkeley Horticultural Nursery is.
You can also get Fragaria virginiana Duchesne, the Virginia Strawberry, also known as wild strawberry, a ground-hugging plant with a perennial root system that produces a loose cluster of small, five-petaled flowers followed by the finest, sweetest, tastiest strawberries.
The edible portion of the strawberry is actually the central portion of the flower which is covered with the embedded, dried, seed-like fruit. Cultivated strawberries are hybrids developed from this native species and the South American one. They’re already sold out for the season, but you can buy them again starting in October. Native bare root Virginia Strawberries are dug and shipped while dormant, mid-October to early Spring. They’re native to the region between Georgia and Oklahoma, but they can be grown anywhere in the country.
Fun fact from the Experimental Farm Network: this strawberry can fight lung cancer!
Find locally grown organic strawberries on our Regenerative Farm Map