I have zero research data on unharvested beds and equally zero practical experience, but nonetheless, I ll ramble on about it. This is only from a disease perspective obviously there are a lot of other things to think about. The reason is that the fungus overwinters completely and entirely in old, mummified, cottonball fruit. When you harvest a bed and remove fruit, you also remove most of the cottonball inoculum for the following year. If you leave the inoculum in the bed, expect big problems in 2001 and for years to come.
Fruit rot diseases.
This has me much less concerned than cottonball. Here s why. So, healthy fruit probably don t carry a lot of pathogen inoculum through the winter. Also important is the fact that most fungal pathogens sporulate profusely on old or dead leaves, but not so much on fruit. And leaves outnumber fruit by far.