Strawberry is not just a flavorful fruit that everybody loves to eat. It is also one of the easiest fruits to plant, grow, and harvest, enabling you to produce a myriad of this nutritious fruit right in the comfort of your home garden.

Cultivated worldwide, the strawberry fruit is well known and appreciated for its bright red color, fragrant aroma, sweetness, and juicy texture. Often consumed in large quantities, strawberries can be eaten fresh or as part of other foods and beverages such as juice, jams, ice cream, pies, chocolates, and milkshakes.

Despite their name, strawberries aren’t true berries and they don’t belong to the same family as blueberries, tomatoes and grapes. Technically, to be considered as a berry, the seed of the fruit has to be inside. However, strawberries wear their seeds on the outside as seen on their skin. In fact, the average strawberry has about 200 seeds on its outer covering.

Strawberries, like apples, belong to the rose family. Both the strawberry and apple fruits have flowers of the same structures. The flowers of plants belonging in the rose family are observed to be symmetrical and are often hermaphroditic.

The garden strawberry was first grown circa 1750’s. The Fragaria virginiana of eastern North America was crossed with Fragaria chiloensis of Chile, which produced the first garden strawberry species we’re now enjoying. Before this, only wild strawberries and cultivated species of wild strawberries were the primary sources of the fruit.