I have grown strawberries from SEEDS, but they were purchased. They were the runner hybrid Sarian F1 and the Alpine Alexandria.... seeds from Johnny's Selected Seeds. In both cases, I got about 50% germination in about 2 weeks, and I was handling them as I would starting tomatoes (sitting on water heater to keep them warm, then IMMEDIATELY into sunlight with protection from chill and winds of March while they grew). Germination was irregular, with one or two still coming a month after seeding.

The seedlings were really tiny and a challenge even to water until they grew a bit.

My suggestions: first get seeds off your berries rather than try the whole fruit. Hopefully other seed savers can weigh in on that one.

Allow that hybridizing of the berries you are using for seeds could cause you two possible problems:

1) infertile "mules" due to lines they were crossed from (seeds of some other modern hybrid plants are infertile due to chromosomes in them)
2) plants totally unlike the berries you took them from because they are hybrids. Working only from memory, I think more than one species of wild strawberry became ancestors to our modern berry patch favorites.

Note that my composting method doesn't destroy seeds with heat, and I have never noticed volunteer strawberries in my garden, but I do have plenty of other fruit and vegetable and herb seeds come up as volunteers.

This ain't much help, but maybe it will give you enough information that you can do the research which will answer your questions.

Thanks Greentongue,

Next time maybe I will dry the strawberry first, then try to collect seeds. I once heard that the pits on strawberries were actually shoots and not seeds, but that is probably wrong.

I'm not worried about the outcome, I just like to experiment.