Iowa’s strawberry season is winding down to the end – and one grower says the pickings weren’t the best this year. Amy Boyer of the Harvest Barn in Osceola in southern Iowa says weather took a toll on the crop. The first week of May she says they had a late frost that killed a lot of the early blossoms on the plants.
Boyer says dry weather also hurt production. Boyer says they needed the rain last fall to get a big stand and they needed rain again in the spring when the blossoms were forming, but she says there wasn’t enough rain both times.
Boyer says that left them without the production they’d hoped for. She says they had about half a normal crop. Boyer says other growers she’s talked to has the same weather problems with strawberries. She says the frost and the lack of moisture got to many of the strawberry growers she talked to this season.
The Iowa Department of Agriculture lists 85 strawberry farms across the state.