There Can Be Only One: The Mighty Toklat Subarctic Strawberry

We haven’t talked too much about our subarctic strawberries this season yet and ours are coming in! So, let’s change that!

There are a number of varieties of strawberry that are quite capable of surviving in our colder zones. Our preference was really chosen for us, we grow the Toklat variety. This was a variety developed out of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and it is one of the strongest subarctic hardy varieties out there!

The reason we say our variety choice was made for us is that we trialed three different varieties in our strawberry beds. Quinalt and Ft. Laramie were the other two in our trial. The Toklat variety simply became so dominant, taking over the entire area within a couple of seasons! The other varieties probably would have done fine on their own, but our trial was straight out of Highlander. “There can be only one!”

The Toklat variety has proven itself as a reliable winner for our gardens over the year. Our beds always come back and they produce runners like crazy. If you’re establishing a new bed, definitely don’t feel like you have to fill it in your first season. This variety will take care of that on its own and probably start growing in all sorts of places you’d rather it not!

We do see a lot of seasonal variability in our strawberry crop. Particularly harsh winters seem to reduce our fruit set, whereas more moderate winters will practically guarantee a bumper crop. Still, Toklat is a fine producer and even a moderate sized bed can keep the gardener in decent supply through much of July. The only gotcha is their berries don’t have much field hardiness, so you have to focus on harvesting them out at regular intervals.

If you’ve never had a homegrown strawberry, you’re absolutely missing out. Like with a lot of home grown foods, strawberries that are grown with care are so much more flavorful than store bought varieties. Since those store bought strawberries need to survive transport, they’re harvested exceptionally early and that greatly impacts taste. It’s hard to explain other than they taste like “real strawberries!”

We haven’t been focusing on a major preservation effort with our strawberries this year, which we often do in a lot of seasons. So, we’ve had the benefit of using our strawberries fresh off the vine a lot this season! So far, we’ve been able to keep up with production, but we still have a lot of fruit coming in for the season. If anything changes, we might do a freezer jam with any excess that we produce as that’s always a popular thing to have around here!

Toklat can be a bit tough to find outside of Fairbanks and the surrounding area. Heck, they can sometimes even be tough for us to find commercially some years! However, there is a strong community of folks trading Toklat runners, with the best availability being mid-June or so.

So, if you’re looking for the “strawberry to end all strawberries” in the far north, this is where we are at! We love our Toklat’s and we’re ultimately glad our strawberry trial ended the way it did!