HEALTH
Smile Eight strawberries contain more Vitamin C than a medium sized orange. That’s 140 percent of the recommended daily intake of Vitamin C for kids. Vitamin C is important for the development of healthy bones and teeth. It also helps fight off colds!
Flex Your Muscles Strawberries are rich in nitrate, which increases the flow of blood & oxygen to your muscles. This makes exercise easier, so you can get big and strong.
Be a Hero Nutritional experts have recently named strawberries a nutritional “superfood,” as a result of their being an excellent source of antioxidants, Vitamin C, potassium, folate and fiber.
So Cool Some say that fresh juice from a strawberry has a cooling effect on feverish patients. Whether you are feeling feverish or just want to stay cool you can chop up strawberries and whirl them a blender with a little water. Pour over ice, and enjoy.
To The Rescue Strawberry juice combined with honey can reduce inflammation and pain from a sunburn. Rub the mixture thoroughly into the skin before rinsing off with warm water and lemon juice.
HISTORY
Love In ancient Greece, the strawberry was a symbol for Venus, the Goddess of Love.
Did Somebody Say Dessert? Native American Indians called strawberries "heart-seed berries" and pounded them into their traditional corn-meal bread. Discovering the great taste of the Native Americans bread, colonists decided to create their own version, which became an American favorite that we all know and love: Strawberry Shortcake. Yum!
Tasty Treatments Ancient Romans used strawberries as medicine, believing they could cure fever, bad breath, gout, sore throats, depression, fainting and diseases of the blood.
Royalty Anne Boleyn, King Henry the VIII’s second wife, had a strawberry birthmark on her neck.
What’s in a Name? There is a legend that strawberries were named in the nineteenth-century by English children who picked the fruit, strung them on grass straws and sold them as "Straws of berries".
Sight to Behold The English and French used the beautiful heart-shaped berries to landscape their gardens. In fourteenth-century France, Charles V ordered twelve hundred strawberry plants to be grown in the Royal Gardens of the Louvre.
SCIENCE
You Are the Sunshine of my Life In order to grow, strawberries need as much as 6 hours of direct sunlight every day.
Easy As 1-2-3 Every strawberry plant is hand-picked approximately every three days. This is the time in which it takes for strawberries to complete their cycle of turning from green to white to red.
Smellin’ Like a Rose That’s because the strawberry belongs to the genus Fragraria in the rose family, along with apples and plums. The name of the scientific classification was derived from the Old Latin word for fragrant. The modern Italian word for strawberry is still "Fragola".
Berry or Not? Not! True berries, such as blueberries and cranberries have seeds inside. The strawberry, however has its dry, yellow "seeds" on the outside (each of which is actually considered a separate fruit). Therefore botanists don’t classify the strawberry as a true berry.
TRIVIA
Did You Know? Strawberries are the only fruit with seeds on the outside of their skin. There are about 200 seeds on each berry!
First in Line Over 53 percent of seven to nine year olds picked strawberries as their favorite fruit.
Cross-Country Berries Strawberries are grown in every state in the United States and every province of Canada.
Berries Like the Golden State The largest strawberry-producing state is California, which harvests 83% of the strawberries grown in the U.S. on approximately 24,500 acres.
Tons of Taste California produces an amazing one billion pounds of strawberries each year. That’s the same as more than 8,000 army tanks or 67,000 male elephants!
We’re #1! Strawberries are the first fruit to ripen in the spring.
Are you weird? People that took part in a recent national survey labeled strawberry lovers as "health conscious, fun loving, intelligent and happy." Non-strawberry lovers, on the other hand, were described as "weird, boring, stuffy--picky, fussy eaters who avoid healthy foods." Which one are YOU?
Around The World If all the strawberries produced in California, in one year, were laid berry to berry, they'd wrap around the world 15 times!
Elf Berries In Bavaria, farmers tie small baskets of strawberries to the horns of their cows as an offering to the elves, who they believed help the cow to make more milk.