Who doesn’t love strawberries? We eat fairly seasonally here so each new thing is exciting! We have planted strawberries in the past and have not had a great experience. Today, I will talk about how and why we grow strawberries the way we do now. Let’s go back in time shall we…it was 1973… just kidding. I wasn’t born yet. Okay, around 6 years ago we readied 3 long beds for strawberries. I marked them and my husband tilled and tilled and tilled. Our soil here is boney as they call it. That means there are lots of rocks. Some are very large. In these parts we need what is called a rear tine tiller. Our friends kindly lent us theirs. If you are not sure what a tiller does, it basically chops up the grass weeds and loosens the soil for planting. The rows were a couple of feet wide by I am not sure how long…maybe 30 or 40 feet? We planted a few different varieties. The strawberries filled in with weeds before long. We had mulched them with hay. That was a bad idea. Hay contains seeds and seeds sprout. It was a big fat mess. Besides the hay seeds and other seeds that are airborne that land and grow, there are some plant roots that are extremely hardy. Plants can grow back from the roots especially when growing with this method. We still keep one long bed (a different one) with strawberries directly in the ground. We have a couple of hundred berries in and around a bed with gooseberries, blueberries, and currants. We do mulch this bed with sawdust and wood chips but it still fills in pretty quickly with weeds. This bed was kind of an overflow area for extra strawberry plants. I figured they would be a good fit for around the other berries. We already mulched the row. It was easy to pop some plants in between the bushes. This bed is harder to maintain. The weeds not only come if from above but also below. They are spread everywhere by seed but also in a bed like this from underneath via roots. Every year we deal with this. Now if you are planting just one little bed of strawberries, it may be no big deal for you. If you happen to already have a large garden to tend, an orchard, animals, homeschool, etc…ease matters. There is only so much time in the day.
Last year we added 8 new raised beds around the perimeter of the garden for strawberries. This has been a nice amount of our family. This area tightly fit 200 plants. I crammed 25 plants in each bed. That was too tight and not necessary but I had a lot.
Strawberries make lots of babies via runners. These are little baby plants that grow from the main plants. So leaving room is better as they will fill in quickly with runners. Once your beds are filled you can pinch off runners and stick the nubby part into water and they will form roots. You can give these away or sell them. They produce A LOT of runners so I like to give them away but it would be a nice thing to do for a farmers market. Planting the runners after they are rooted for sale.
Considerations for planting: strawberry plants need a watering source. They do significantly better when watered on a regular basis. I have some that I cannot reach with my hose and they are kind of a we get what we get bed. They do not produce as well. Blueberries, gooseberries, and currants have done fine without watering here where we live. We have a lot of plants to tend and some are far from a water source. Since I can’t reach them with the hose, I heavily mulch them. I had planned to irrigate them eventually but sometimes things change.
Planting in a bed: you can use whatever you have available to you. You do not need to go out and buy beds unless you want to. You can make beds out of anything. They do well in full sun. You could plant them on the south facing side of your home. I prefer to utilize this space for figs since it is a very warm place and I have other spaces for berries. But the reason I mention planting along the house is for ease. The house acts as one side of the bed so you only need to build up the other sides. Depending on how you are going to make your beds, I recommend either weed whacking short and sheet mulching or taking up the sod over tilling.
Our beds were an experiment that turned out well. I sheet mulched by putting a wheel barrow or two of sawdust in the bottom on top of the barrier. Next we added chicken bedding with manure mixed in that had been in the coop over the winter. Not composted but ready to clean out from using the deep litter method over the winter. We put a wheel barrow or two of this in each bed next. Then we added compost to plant directly in. The stuff underneath will do a couple of things. It will hold moisture and it will break down over time and feed the plants. I wasn’t sure how this would work but it worked very well!
There is another reason to plant in a bed. Strawberry plants can be a pain to deal with in terms of life expectancy. Having to figure out a way to collect runners for new plants and swap them out is not something I wanted to deal with. Instead, every couple of years you can mulch them thickly and the strongest plants come up. A bed helps contain the mulch. You do not need a very deep bed. In fact too deep a bed with too high of walls can result in moldy berries from them not getting enough air flow.
You can make a bed out of anything you have. For around the house, we use rocks we gathered when digging holes for fruit trees. They were plentiful!
So this bed is utilizing the house behind it. In this bed, my husband trimmed very short. We should have taken the sod off because there was an invasive plant beneath that has continued to push through. Next, we laid heavy cardboard and lined with rocks. Then we mulched thickly. When I planted, I pushed away the wood chips and put soil in that spot. This was for raspberries and elderberries. I don’t recommend this method for strawberries. They would need soil as I described above. You can see from the picture, it worked well.
In addition to lots of fresh eating, we froze a lot of strawberries this year. We also made fruit leather with applesauce and strawberries, crumbles, muffins, ice cream. In previous years I have made jam as well and sorbet.
Here is a pan muffin and crumble recipe I made this year. I just substituted the blackberries with strawberries. I use whole grain spelt flour in the muffin recipe. The cobbler recipe is grain free. If you want it paleo, you can substitute the butter with coconut oil with a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of nutritional yeast for a butter flavor.
It was always a dream of mine to have my children be able to go outside and eat good food. And that, they do. We have planted food all over the place for that reason. Planting food is a small investment monetarily speaking. It definitely costs more in time and energy but look at what you get! Manufactured food is not grown for the same purpose. It is manufactured for profit. Where there is profit, there will not be the same thoughts in production. For example growing large quantities of food can mean using pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc to produce. Organic producers still use some but they have to be approved. The berries are picked and washed and packaged and shipped. There are a lot of things that can happen in that process. This year there was a hepatitis ”breakout” with organic strawberries. Kind of scary. I prefer growing my own hands down. Then I know every bit of what goes in and how they are processed. Things can happen at home too, but this gives me more control over my food supply.
I started this post months ago when we were picking. Now it is almost fall and we have lots of runners so I can finish my post. This is the fun part. As I said before, strawberries produce a lot of babies. If you have a friend that has strawberries, ask for some runners! There is enough time now to grow the roots and plant them before winter so they can be established to make it through the winter.
Here are a handful I pulled out to root. The one with the big roots had already planted itself in soil outside a bed. They like to spill out over the beds…like young adults trying to find their own way, lol. You can see the roots are at various stages.
Now, go get yourself some runners! They are free if you have a friend with strawberries that is willing to share. One main reason for this post is for folks I will be giving away runners to. You only need a temporary place to plant them in the ground once they root. You can mulch them for the winter and move them once they wake up in the spring. So, you do not need a bed ready right now if that is your chosen method. I do recommend planting them in the ground as soon as possible so they can spread out before the ground freezes. At the peak of picking, we were getting about 16 cups a day this year. That was a huge blessing for our family. We planted these last year. That is a great turn around if you ask me. We were picking a few times a day last year in small quantities for snacks…the same year we planted! We do NOT pick flowers off our plants the first year. We have way too many to do that. Besides, we ate the berries instead 😉 They were delicious. I hope I have inspired you to plant some strawberries! Cheers!