Many owners of household plots want to grow something on their plot that can surprise their neighbors. More recently, neighbors could not only be surprised, but even frightened by purple bell pepper or black tomato. Today this task is much more difficult. The Internet has appeared in almost every home, and you will not find any variety of vegetables and fruits in seed stores. Striped pink eggplants, white cucumbers, purple carrots… It looks like showing off unusual fruits and vegetables is a thing of the past. But it happens, you just want to plant something interesting and unusual.
How can you surprise your neighbors and decorate your site? More and more often on the Internet there is a mention of blue strawberries. True, garden strawberries are usually grown in the beds. Strawberries are rare in the garden and there is no fundamental difference between these plants. These are two species belonging to the same genus “strawberry”.
Wild strawberry on the left, meadow strawberry on the right.
Initially, strawberries were called green strawberries because of the spherical shape of the fruit.
The absence of stepchildren depends on the work of breeders.
For consumers, there is not much difference whether strawberries or strawberries grow in the garden. For the gardener, there is only one difference: the yield of strawberries is lower than that of garden strawberries. Agricultural techniques and soil requirements for these plants are the same. Taste too.
For a botanist, there are differences. Strawberries have a stem 5 cm longer than strawberries. The flowers of strawberries are bisexual, those of strawberries are dioecious.
Blue strawberries – a myth?
But, back to the blue berry. For the query “buy blue strawberries”, Google gives either links to Aliexpress, where you can buy the seeds of this outlandish fruit, or links to sites where they wonder if blue strawberries really exist and if there is a photo.
There is a photo. All from Aliexpress. Rare non-Chinese sites offering blue strawberry seeds, upon closer examination, turn out to be intermediaries of the same China.
At the same time, the Chinese themselves are unlikely to be able to answer the question whether they have strawberries or strawberries.
But the video where happy gardeners brag about the harvest of blue berries does not exist. All videos end with the level “they sent me seeds” or “here, a bush of Chinese strawberries has grown, the berries have not yet been seen.”
On the forums, you can find the opinion that the blue berry is a genetically modified plant with the gene of the Arctic flounder. The type of flounder is not specified, although there are about a dozen species of these flatfish in the northern seas, including halibut.
They also do not explain why the berry with the arctic fish gene changed color. But the video clearly shows how you can “geno-modify” an ordinary red strawberry.
Internet myth
And in the photo near the leaves, an unfinished red border is visible.
The color of the “insides” of blue strawberries, apparently, depends on the individual ideas of the photoshopper about how this blue berry should look from the inside.
The level of “toxicity” of the color, apparently, also often depends on the conscience of the photoshopper.
And his good faith. They didn’t separate the seeds separately here, painting everything evenly.
Another example of a photoshop oversight.
Sepals of this color are found in red berries (not so “poisonous”), in blue strawberries they have nowhere to come from. But it looks nice.
Different variations of the color of the berry and the “insides”.
But there are blue strawberries without Photoshop and genetic modifications. It’s pretty easy to get it.
It is enough to take an aerosol can with blue food paint. This photo is not photoshop, but an ordinary red berry painted with paint.
Reviews
If you look on the forums where people share their experience of buying and growing blue strawberries from seeds, you can only find such reviews:
To summarize
The rainbow-colored grapes and blue strawberries that come across are obviously colored in Photoshop.
In this case, we are talking about such a grape.
All the reviews about the exotic blue berry, by and large, come down to the fact that either nothing has grown at all, or not a strawberry has grown, or it has grown, but of the usual red color. Moreover, the grown berry turned out to have a disgusting “plastic” taste.
On the other hand, the seeds are inexpensive, sellers sometimes send them with gifts. You can take a chance and buy not a sample. Apart from a couple of dollars for seeds and some land for seedlings, there is nothing to lose. Perhaps someone, after all, will be able to boast of a photo or video of blue exotic berries growing in the garden.