If you’re like me, you might not have been able to resist the
temptation of buying a couple six packs of strawberry transplants
during your recent visits to the garden center.
If you’re like me, you might not have been able to resist the temptation of buying a couple six packs of strawberry transplants during your recent visits to the garden center. After all, who doesn’t dream of biting into a luscious, red strawberry picked right from your own back yard? Strawberries are nature’s most perfect dessert – sweet, tender, juicy – and more so when freshly picked.
And you can grow strawberries, too. Thanks to our near-perfect local weather for strawberries, they are among the easiest crops to grow. Just take a look at local strawberry growers and the roadside stands to know that we live in strawberry country.
Strawberries are versatile, too, in that they are just at home in the ground – in rows or mounds – or in containers like strawberry jars with their own individual growing pockets. Already-started strawberry plants are available in six packs this time of year. You can also buy them in bare-root form during the winter.
To grow strawberries in the ground like the commercial growers, prepare your soil as you would most vegetable crops. Add plenty of organic material, garden compost, peat moss, etc. If you really want to grow strawberries like the professionals, heap the soil into raised rows at least 8 inches high and 20 to 30 inches wide. Set plants out in a diamond pattern, spacing them 12 to 18 inches apart in the soil with their roots spread out and down, and their crowns just above ground level. You can water by flooding the rows the old-fashioned way, using a soaker hose, drip irrigation or even overhead watering.
After five or six weeks in the ground, strawberry plants will begin to “run.” No, they won’t actually get up and run. Instead, they’ll send out runners, which are long tendrils. A first daughter plant will form and root, then the runners will set out more daughters. Keep only the first daughter of each runner as it will bear better than the second or third daughter on the same runner. By allowing these daughters to root and become established, you’ll be adding to the number of plants you have that will bear fruit. It’s a great way to increase your production … for free.
I’m sure you’ve also seen strawberry jars at nurseries. These are usually terra cotta jars with little pockets protruding from the container’s sides. You can plant the top with two or three plants, and fill each pocket with a single plant. Just be sure to use packaged potting soil rather than plain dirt for the containers.
Wherever you plant your strawberries, protect fruit from birds with netting. Birds have the uncanny ability to find ripe fruit before gardeners do. There’s not much worse than when birds take one peck out of a berry and leave the rest to rot. Go for it with fresh strawberries this summer.
