With the calendar flipping to March later this week, the peak of strawberry season is now underway in the Santa Maria Valley, and so too is optimism for local farmers, who are hoping the crop will yield a successful harvest in 2025.
"Central Coast strawberry season is just starting to ramp up," said Randy Sharer, Satellite Farms owner. "We've gone through the cold weather and we're getting longer daylight now with good sunshine like this morning. We're really going to be hitting it in production here in the next few weeks."
Sharer, who has been farming in the Santa Maria Valley for more than 40 years pointed out that while there has been very little rain over the last several months, growing conditions for strawberries have not been adversely affected.
"Strawberries are extremely climate-sensitive," said Sharer. "They need X-amount of hours of chill temperatures. Nighttime temperatures under 45 degrees. They also need dry weather because they're quite susceptible to any number of fungus and then we need good sunshine because there's nothing makes the world grow more than sunlight does."
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