Yesterday we had our first customers come pick the very early ripe berries.  The field was picked clean by late morning and we were forced to turn away customers.  We closed the field until Thursday, hopefully this awful cloudy weather pattern will break and we can finally get some sunshine.  We appear to be way ahead of other strawberry farms in the area, probably due to our prompt planting Oct. 1 as well as the winter application of row covers that accelerated the growth on half the field.  It will likely be at least another week of sunny weather before the entire field starts producing. 

Now the very bad news.  We are seeing more than a minor number of total plant collapse in some areas of the field.  I pulled a couple collapsed plants and after examining the crowns am quite sure that we have an anthracnose crown rot infection issue (The Glo).  This fungus is a terrible problem for strawberry plants in our region and an entire industry has been developed in Canada to grow strawberry plants that are free of this disease.  Last fall "The Glo" was diagnosed in many plants throughout the Carolinas originating primarily in North Carolina grown plant material.  We learned this spring that some farmers lost up to 50% of their strawberry fields last fall due to infected plant material.  This represents thousands of dollars/per acre in plant cost that is wasted, not to mention the loss of all the potential income.  We learned that our own plant supplier experienced terrible losses as did several of his farmers who purchased his plugs.  Fortunately, we experienced no losses in the fall and all of our plants appeared healthy and normal.  Until now.  Plants are wilting and dying.  All that we can do now is remove the wilting plants from the field to prevent the fungus from infecting neighboring plants and hope that our losses will be in the single digit percentages. As the weather warms up and the plants are stressed by heat and fruiting, we will certainly experience more losses. 

All I can say is that strawberry farming is not for the faint-hearted.  Between droughts, freezing weather, fungus, and creature damage, it is a wonder that strawberries can be raised profitably at all.  We do everything in our power to combat these enemies, but some of them still get you one way or another.