BUXTON – The calendar still said May last week, but the strawberries at Little River Flower Farm in Buxton were busting out all over like it was June.

“We just started picking today,” said farmer Nancy Stedman, regarding the farm’s organic strawberry crop. “They’re about two weeks earlier than last year.”

Strawberry season in southern Maine typically doesn’t get under way until the middle part of June or later. However, David Handley, a vegetable and small fruit specialist at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, said last week that the warm spring has given strawberry season a head start this year.

“Right now,” he said. “It looks like it’s going to be significantly earlier than usual.”

In southern Maine, he said, a few growers who used fabric row coverings to protect their plants already have ripe fruit that they’re starting to pick. And he said that “berries that weren’t treated that way are fast behind them.”

Early harvest

Of course, when the fruit at your favorite local strawberry farm is ready depends on a variety of factors. They include the farm’s location – whether it’s inland or on the coast; what variety of berries the farm has planted – some produce earlier than others; -and whether the farm was impacted by a severe freeze following Mother’s Day.

However, Handley cautioned, if you’re one of those people who waits until the Fourth of July to buy strawberries for shortcake, you might not want to delay so long this year.

“It looks like a very early harvest season ahead,” he said.

The Little River Flower Farm, an organic farm that sells flowers and other produce in addition to strawberries, is one of the southern Maine farms experiencing an early harvest. Strawberries at the farm were being picked for the first time on May 28.

Stedman said she has been notifying regular customers that the strawberries are ripe, much to the customers’ surprise.

“They were so glad I called them,” she said. “People usually call us (about strawberries). They start calling around July 4.”

Stedman said she didn’t put row covers over her approximately 4,000 strawberry plants, but did surround them with black plastic.

“That helps heat them up early in the spring,” she said.

She believes the plastic may also have saved her plants from being ravaged by a severe freeze in May. The plastic may have given off some heat that protected the plants, she said.

May freeze

Other farmers weren’t so lucky in the freeze, Handley said. He said it occurred May 10, where the temperature dipped to the low 20s in some locations. Also, he said, “a lot of farmers got frost the following two nights, May 11 and 12.”

It was like a “double punch,” Handley said. The warm spring had coaxed the blossoms to come out earlier than usual on the early variety of strawberry plants, making them vulnerable to frost.

Damage ranged from the destruction of about 10 percent of the crop in some fields, Handley said, to 50 percent in a few.

One of the farms affected was Patten’s Farm in Gorham, which lost some of its early strawberries, but has high hopes for its June-bearing ones.

“Well, we lost some, like everybody else,” farmer Donald Patten said of the freeze.

He said he usually has about three acres of early strawberries and lost about half of them in the freeze, even though “we watered them and did everything in the book.”

In Gorham, Patten said, he has about 10 acres of strawberries in total and the rest of the plants are doing well.

“We’ve got great hopes for the mid-season ones and the later ones,” he said last week. “This hot weather has brought out the blossoms pretty good.”

He said he expects the crop there to be ready the last week in June or first week in July.

At Gillespie Farms, which has 12 to 15 acres of strawberries in fields located in New Gloucester and Gray, farmer Greg Gillespie said that some of the early strawberries were damaged in the frost, but others survived and the later strawberries are doing well.

“We’re picking right now, which is about 10 days early,” said Gillespie.

The farm supplies Hannaford supermarkets in greater Portland and he said berries may be in the stores next week.

At Maxwell’s Farm in Cape Elizabeth, the farm’s approximately 10 acres of strawberries had only minor damage in the freeze, said farmer Bill Bamford.

He said strawberry season at Maxwell’s usually starts in the last week of June.

“It’s going to be a little bit earlier this year,” he predicted.

Still, Bamford was reluctant last week to name a date when the season will start because changes in the weather in June could impact how quickly the berries ripen.

“We’ve still got a long way to go,” he said.

In Sanford, at Lavigne Strawberry Farm, Denise Lavigne said last week that she expected strawberries there to be ready “in two or three weeks.”

“So far it’s looking good,” she said of the crop there, where whole generations of families have come for more than three decades to pick strawberries.

At Doles Orchard in Limington, Emily Tripp said strawberries there could be ready between June 10 and June 15. But Tripp, whose parents Earl and Nancy Bunting have owned the farm for about two decades, cautioned: “It’s never easy to predict.”

Strawberry season there usually starts anywhere from June 12 to June 26. This year, Tripp believes, “it will be on the early side of average … Things are moving along pretty fast.”

She urged consumers to start associating fresh Maine strawberries with a holiday other than the Fourth of July. “Think Father’s Day,” Tripp said. “It’s usually right around Father’s Day that we start picking.”

Late harvest

And Maine strawberry lovers also shouldn’t assume strawberry season is over once July has passed, according to Tripp and other farmers.

That’s because Doles Orchard, the Little River Flower Farm and Gillespie’s are among Maine farms that now also grow strawberries that bear fruit later in the summer and into the fall.

“We do have a fall-bearing strawberry from August into October,” Tripp said. “That’s something that a lot of people don’t realize that we have.”

Handley said that such strawberries, called day neutral strawberries because they don’t require the short days of spring to produce flower buds but can blossom in the summer, are “becoming more common.”

However, Handley said that growing the late-bearing plants is labor intensive, so he said they are “still a relatively small piece of the overall strawberry pie.”

At Little River Flower Farm, the late-bearing strawberry season there typically begins in the latter part of July, said Stedman.

She said she’d like to get the message out to consumers that fresh Maine strawberries now can be enjoyed all summer and into the fall, not just on July 4.

“They don’t realize that strawberry season is expanding,” she said. “You can get strawberries a lot earlier and a lot later.”

“This hot weather has brought out the blossoms pretty good,” said Frank Patten, of Patten’s Farm in Gorham. He said he expects his strawberry crop will be ready in a few weeks. A farm in Buxton is already starting to pick berries. (Photo by Rich Obrey)