Welcome back my friends to the Bee Podcast. Today we have a very special guest.

We're talking all about the fruit I recommend most people to grow as beginners before any other fruit and that would be strawberries and we have

Gerald Holmes on the show. He's the founding director of the Strawberry Center at

Calipollic State University in San Luis Obispo, which is the college I almost went to

University of California, Santa Barbara.

That was my second choice.

Jorro.

He drove on his PhD in Plant Pathology from UC Riverside in 1994 and then worked at a cooperative extension farm advisor in Imperial

County for three years.

So you have a ton of experience in this world, far more than I do.

Strawberry is one of mine and our listeners' favorite fruits to grow Gerald,

and we're starting it off with Strawberry Flavor,

which I think is a cool place to start like as someone who's cultivated these and is the founding director of the strawberry center like what what factors go into

strawberry flavor? Well, it's for me it's mostly the sweetness of it and the acidity.

So I like to have both.

Some strawberries are just super sweet.

I think of it kind of like peaches. Some peaches are just sugary sweet. I think of it kind of like peaches. Some peaches are just sugary sweet and then some have a little bit of a tartness to them, an acid, and I think similar for strawberries. I like the combination. I think it gives it a lot more depth.

And so that's something I look for. The texture is also really important to the

flavor and so is the aroma. You don't think about that, but before it ever touches your tongue it'll touch your

nostrils and you start to get a sense of what's there just by the aroma and some

varieties are much more aromatic than others.

So how much of those three, so the sweetness, the acidity,

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