Go strawberry picking at Visakhapatnam’s Lambasingi village this winter and discover some new varieties

Lambasingi’s farms embrace new varieties of strawberries to improve sales and draw more visitors. Try them off the plant or in a spoonful of jam

The morning sun slices through the winter mist across large patches of strawberry fields in Lambasingi, a small village perched on the Eastern Ghats in Chintapalli mandal, Visakhapatnam district. Stooping over the neat rows, farm workers get to work gently plucking the red juicy fruit and dropping it into their baskets.

In this part of the country, strawberries have been paying sweet dividends for the past five years, ever since the crop was introduced in the region. While Winter Dawn is the common variety of strawberry grown here, buoyed by the success of strawberry production in Lambasingi, this season growers have introduced new varieties: San Andreas, Murano, Nabila, Florence and Flaminia. The reason: A growing demand for bigger varieties of strawberries. The new varieties have large berries giving it an attractive appearance and has a sweeter flavour. The San Andreas variety also has excellent overall disease resistance.

Known for its mist and single digit temperatures in winters, Lambasingi’s popularity shot up after its first harvest of strawberries, and the farms soon became a crowd-puller.