I'm changing focus from strawberry gardening to growing fig trees, after frustration and burnout from always trying to find a better berry and it not being better, or no availability of the kind I want to try.
Strawberry growing is taking any two restaurant menus that have way too many dishes on the menu, and then having people swear by a dozen or so varieties as being the best, then after timely research you find the best handful through reviews, but they aren't sold by anyone, or 99.9% of their availability is on another continent, or you find a plant nursery with the variety you want that is less than 200 hundred miles away, but won't ship. Or the plant is only permitted to be grown by certain growers, who then sell their "gourmet strawberry" for $5 or more a berry (Japan is an offender of this kind).
Of the 20-30 varieties I've tried, most strawberries are generic and vary only slightly in acidity and tartness and sweetness and least important, appearance. Once in a while, you come across one that has a different flavor, or more flavor than typical, with some tasting almost like a different fruit than the others. In addition to regular garden strawberries, I have tried alpine, musk, and pine berry. The latter three were utter disappointments, especially for the reputation they (seem to) hold. Their biggest flaw is that they are just not a tasty red berry. Pineberry having no special flavor, being small, and the plants unproductive. Alpine and musk are just not easily produced in the quantity needed to best enjoy their flavor, but even then I think I would not appreciate them the way I could a regular strawberry. Hood and Sonata where the best garden types I have tasted.
At this point it is not worth being a strawberry enthusiast because I have been burned multiple times now by locating and growing strawberries that were supposed to be "the ultimate," and were only barely average or were a below average experience. To take it even further, I'd have to locate suppliers for these supposed premium heirloom types, which is virtually impossible for my part of the world, and I have to remind myself that no fruit is life changing (despite people constantly implying that in their reviews of a strawberry).
In my opinion, with figs, as long as you don't grow brown turkey, you can't grow wrong, and the fruit is every bit as enjoyable or more than the best strawberry ever could be, so this is what I'll be working on. I have two trees currently, a 6 foot unknown green type, and a negronne just starting. With figs, you either live where they grow wild and abundantly so they're not a big deal, or like me you live where you can technically grow them but can almost never buy fresh ones (and when you can, they are never as good as home grown), or you can't grow/get them at all. The fig itself that we eat, oddly enough, is a flower, while strawberry is not a berry and the good part is only an accessory fruit. I suppose it is a sense of incompleteness that is making me unhappy, since I have to quit before tasting a truly large range of strawberries, but I remind myself I was never going to get to try the japanese kinds, or the special plants used in cultivation with often unique characteristics.
