The berries are picked elsewhere, but the plants start in Macdoel

“If you’re buying fruit in the stores now, that’s coming off plants that were harvested here last October,” he said.

Eight operations

Home to eight nursery operations, the area has been identified as the ideal place to mature and propagate disease-free strawberry plants. The climate is just right to put the plants in dormancy before they are shipped to Southern California to produce berries, said Marshal Nilsson, farm manager for Cedar Point Nursery.

“Everything that makes it hard to grow anything else here is good for strawberries,” he said.

Cedar Point Nursery outside Dorris was the first nursery in Butte Valley to create a greenhouse effect by putting plastic over the freshly planted mother strawberries, said Jim Smith, an agriculture standards inspector for Siskiyou County Department of Agriculture. The plants are irrigated with a flat drip system that requires a filter to work properly, he said.

Water to all Butte Valley farms comes from wells, Smith said. There are about 3,000 acres of strawberry nurseries in the area, and more near Tulelake, Malin and Bonanza.

Crown Nursery near Macdoel is experimenting with the plastic covers that Cedar Point Nursery pioneered. Field Foreman Javier Venegas said this is the second year that Crown Nursery has placed plastic over its rows on 80 acres of fields.

“It worked great last year,” he said. “If the product is better, we’ll do more acres because it helps the plants grow faster.”

Venegas said the plastic would stay on the covered plants until mid-July, when it would be removed. Uncovered plants must be tended by hand sooner to prevent flowers from forming, but Venegas said it is too hot under the plastic for the flowers to form.

Work done by hand

Much of the work at the strawberry nurseries is done by hand. Four planting machines at Lassen Canyon Nursery have 26 people working with each planter. Some place each strawberry plant into the planter by hand; others follow behind with shovels to ensure the plants have good contact with the soil. Scholer said he had 136 men and women working Wednesday.

Instead of fruit, the strawberries will produce between 25 and 30 runners. Those are positioned by hand as well. With the discovery of the quality of the strawberry plants grown in Butte Valley, strawberry nurseries have become a valuable employer in the area, Smith said.

“There’re probably more people working down here now than in the heyday of potatoes,” he said.