FungRadar

Wild strawberry

Fragaria vesca

Woodland rides, clearings, railway banks, old quarries and the edges of tracks: anywhere with light and thin, well-drained soil. Under a closed canopy the leaves grow on and the plant rarely fruits, which is why a wood full of strawberry leaves can hold almost no strawberries.

Wild strawberry — botanical illustration
Wild strawberrywhite flower with a yellow centre, fruit small and scented
Do not confuse it. Nothing poisonous is easily taken for it. Barren strawberry (Potentilla sterilis) shares the ground and looks the part until it fails to fruit, and it is harmless. The hazard at this height is a different plant: lords-and-ladies (Arum maculatum) stands a spike of red berries at ankle level on the same woodland floor, is severely irritant, and is behind many of the plant-poisoning calls involving children in Britain. It has no runners, no three-part leaf and no white flower — read all three, not any one of them. Second, and it has nothing to do with identification: across much of continental Europe the fox tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis is established, and its eggs reach low fruit from fox droppings. Britain and Ireland are free of it; France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Low Countries, Denmark, Poland and the Baltic states are not. Washing does not reliably remove the eggs and heat does. Where the parasite is present, that is a stronger reason not to eat low wild fruit straight from the plant than anything in the paragraph above.

Ripe fruit is dark red and lifts away with its calyx; unripe fruit holds on. The scent carries several paces, and a patch is usually found by smell rather than by looking. Verges are the worst place to pick: the plant likes them, and so does everything that runs along them.

Where people are picking now

the best place in the region — not an average over the region. Regions are ranked by today's number.

The fraction beside the stage says how many measurement points out of how many the region was computed from. “1/22” means the weather history was long enough at one place out of twenty-two: the number describes that place, not the whole region.

  1. Trentino-Alto Adigeripe100
  2. Abruzzodropping0
  3. Calabriadropping0
  4. Campaniadropping0
  5. Emilia-Romagnadropping0
  6. Friuli-Venezia Giuliadropping0
  7. Goriškadropping2/40
  8. Laziodropping0
  9. Liguriadropping0
  10. Lombardiadropping10/470
  11. Piemonteunripe2/490
  12. Toscanadropping0

The forecast is computed for 17 regions out of 583. The rest are not listed — that is "not computed", not "no berries".

Map

The field is built from a network of measurement points, the way a meteorologist draws a rainfall map from a network of stations: the value is computed at each point and interpolated between them. A cell is about 250 km² across, which is the resolution our weather data comes at, and we do not draw it finer: that would be invented precision. Only the “how much” goes into the colour, not the stage: “a little, ripe” and “plenty, still green” look the same on the map — read the stage on the card. Blank cells are where the season history was too short to compute, not where the berry is absent.

All berries, compared for today

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