People craving fresh, locally grown strawberries will have to wait a little longer.
The crop is about three weeks late, the worst delay in 20 years, said Dianna Biringer, one of the owners of Biringer Farm in Arlington.
“Most farmers would not
admit it, but it’s stressful,” she said.
Blame the cold and wet spring for this delay.
“If we had three weeks of warm weather, the berries would have been ripe,” said Biringer, adding that the two sunny days of spring have not been enough.
Stuart Poage, owner of the Yakima Fruit Market and Nursery in Bothell, generally buys strawberries from eight different farms between Oregon and Skagit County, two of them in Snohomish County. Half of them have told him strawberries won’t be ready until a couple of weeks from now.
“Strawberries generally start right about Father’s Day weekend,” he said. “This year, it didn’t happen.”
“We all are affected by the weather conditions,” he said.
Strawberries aren’t the only late-blooming crop. Everything from blueberries to corn will be delayed because they were planted late due to the cold spring, Poage said.
Strawberries are an important crop for many farmers. It’s the first cash crop of the year that helps pay farmers’ bills, Poage said.
Will the late spring cause consumers pain in their wallets? Poage said he’s not sure, because farmers haven’t been able to quote him a price. That’s because no one knows what the supply will actually be. There also are other factors that could affect price.
Biringer Farm was open over the weekend as part of the Marysville Strawberry Festival. The farm provided the festival with frozen sliced and sugared berries from last year’s crop. Traditionally, the farm gives the first strawberries of the year to the festival.
In the past, Biringer has bought berries from other growers when their crops came earlier, but this time she couldn’t find any.
She said she hopes there will be some strawberries ready for picking next weekend.
Berries are the main crop on her farm. Biringer said it’s possible the farm will sell raspberries and strawberries at the same time. Raspberries are a later crop and usually are never picked at the same time as strawberries.
Biringer said customers are used to buying strawberries earlier in the year. So she’s nervous that they may pass on a late crop. She’s hoping that people will still crave fresh strawberries later this month or in July.
The Marysville Strawberry Festival had to rely on strawberries from outside the state this year, said Marilyn Boe, a volunteer at the festival and the assistant vice-president branch manager for HomeStreet Bank in Marysville.
“Normally we provide strawberry shortcake at our lobby,” Boe said. “We did not do it this year because we don’t have any local strawberries, which was disappointing.”
Alejandro Dominguez: 425-339-3422; adominguez@heraldnet.com.
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