My firm belief is that every garden needs strawberries.
In every home we have lived in as a family, one of my first things to grow is strawberries. The flavor of a homegrown berry is unlike any commercial berry. It is 100% ripe without being gassed to appear ripe, juicy, and pesticide, herbicide, and fungicide-free. At our last place, I went into strawberry production to simply see what I could do, and I built dedicated beds that were test gardens. It is also an easy project, as you can fill a couple of planters or pots and put them out to grow. Even apartments can grow them. You don’t need a vast garden to do it.
A visit to a dollar store, a few gnome and fairy parts, and you can plant a cute children’s berry spot. Children absolutely love these! Especially if you let them pick out what you put in it. And they take care of it.
It’s Time To Get Going:
If you want strawberries in June and beyond, now is the time to get going on your plants. And this applies to both growing from seed varieties and starting bare-root plants.
If you are out shopping at big-box stores (and online), you will see many options for bare-root plants, and time is ticking on them. As the days get longer, and the bags sit in the stores, they are starting to sprout. They only have so much energy to grow. Chances are, once you open the package, at least half, if not all, of them will have new leaves from the dormant crown. Make sure to get a mix of varieties: have half be June-bearing, the other half Everbearing, so you have berries all summer into early fall.
Below you can see where I have planted a number of bare-root plants. They have the long, pale set of leaves when a plant is desperately seeking light. The price was right for the starts, so I took a chance on them. Strawberries are very resilient plants and bounce back well.
The plants are in the greenhouse for now and are doing well. The leaves have grown and are now dark green. A couple of plants haven’t greened out yet, but I give them time. They will grow in this pot until late spring, when I will transplant them into the garden. I have also planted 30 more bare roots around the blueberry bushes I transplanted recently. Because we still have cold weather, I mulched them with leaves for protection.
The other type of strawberry is the “alpine” heritage type, which comes in a wide variety of varieties. And colors. You can grow white, yellow, and red berries. I have grown and bred them for years, one year I had 21 varieties I was growing and then selling.
We wrote a post on how to grow them, as they do take time to sprout and get big. The first year, you often don’t get berries till late summer (these strawberry plants are everbearing, meaning they have two distinct crop periods each year).
We also wrote about wether in ground is better than hanging pots, in case you wonder which way to go.
And if you have birds or squirrels that eat all your berries, consider a berry cage you can walk into – this was ours at our last place. It was a great conversation starter when people visited our homestead for sure.
This year, I picked up Strawberry Supports to try out on second-year plants in the garden. So far, I haven’t had a slug issue, but then spring isn’t here yet. I am hoping that the garden, with farm fabric under the raised beds, will help keep the issues away. But just in case that fails, I decided to try raising the plants higher, off the soil.
The supports are 2 main pieces with 4 legs that you pop in. You can start the supports low to the ground, then work them up as the plants grow. It allows (in theory, of course!) more air flow for less mold on berries, and above slugs/snails.
I am running it as a test in a 4×4 foot section of one of the beds (there are other plants in this bed, that will come up in spring, such as ramps and shallots – none of which produce shade onto the berry plants).
Byt June I should know if it works or not.
But for now? It’s time to get your plants going!
~Sarah