The calendar still said May last week, but much of the strawberry crop in southern Maine was acting as if it were June.

“It’s going to be a bit earlier this year,” predicted farmer Bill Bamford of Maxwell’s Farm in Cape Elizabeth.

And while Maxwell’s strawberries are not quite ready yet – Bamford said the farm’s berries still may have a couple more weeks to go – some farmers have fruit that already is ripe.

“We just started picking today,” said farmer Nancy Stedman of Little River Flower Farm in Buxton on May 28. “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, the farmer, 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, when 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.”

When a freeze occurs, ice crystals form on the plant, destroying the delicate berry blossoms and turning them black. But if farmers rush out at night to water the plants before the freeze occurs, they can protect the blossoms by encasing them in ice, Handley explained.

That may sound counterintuitive, but Handley said the plants can withstand a temperature of about 32 degrees. And he said that as the water coats the leaves and flowers and turns to ice, energy is released in the form of heat, protecting the plant from the below-freezing air temperatures surrounding it.

Farmers typically can stop watering when the sun comes up and melts the ice. However, Handley said that in the May freeze, temperatures dropped early in the night and stayed below freezing after the sun rose in some locations, forcing farmers there to keep on irrigating their fields until 8 a.m. or 9 a.m.

Handley said that when he went out to farms after the freeze, “in some fields I was up to my ankles in water and it wasn’t because of rain.”

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 and the Little River Flower Farm 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.”

Bill Bamford, owner of Maxwell’s Farm in Cape Elizabeth, examines a strawberry plant late last week. The warm spring has given the fruit a head start. Maxwell’s pick-your-own operation near Two Lights State Park attracts hundred of customers during the short picking season. (Photo by Rich Obrey)