How to Grow Strawberries in Your Garden

Grow strawberries; they are easy to produce and deserve a

place in your garden.
July/August 2010

http://www.grit.com/garden/fruit/how-to-grow-strawberries.aspx

Strawberries – everyone’s favorite fruit – are welcome

heralds of summer, and they are so easy to grow in a

garden, flower bed, or any patch of sandy soil – even in a

patio pot.

Strawberry plants are inexpensive and available in most

local nurseries and mail-order garden catalogs. Any

gardener will have success growing the fruit if she

follows a few simple rules.

Why grow your own? Nothing is more pleasant than getting

up early on a clear sunny morning, wandering outside while

a mockingbird sings, and finding five or six dewy,

sparkling red berries with which to decorate your morning

bowl of cereal. The flavor of fresh berries is rich, pure

and crisp.

Several years ago when my U-Pick berry patch in Johnson

County, Missouri, was at its height of popularity, good

store-bought commercial berries were hard to find. The

overly large cone-shaped Driscoll variety, widely

available at most grocery stores, lacked flavor and had a

crunchy texture making it difficult to believe that these

were even an edible food. Since then, producers have come

a long way in improving the commercial strawberry, and

although still overly firm (necessary for successful

shipping), the flavor has improved. However, outstanding

flavor, convenience, cost, quality and stellar health

benefits are all good reasons for cultivating your own

patch, large or small.
What variety?

I have grown berries in my yard for many years,

experimenting with several different cultivars. But I keep

coming back to the same old variety – Surecrop. It is the

first berry type I grew more than 20 years ago and is in

my garden this spring. It’s the variety that I regularly

provide for the participants in the local strawberry-

growing classes that I teach.

Surecrop is foolproof to grow and has been around for a

long time. These plants are hardy, prolific and

dependable. In fact, Surecrop’s prolific runners sometimes

become their own brand of “weed,” producing more volunteer

runner plants than there is space to accommodate.

Berry plants send out many slender string-like daughter

runners, which will root and produce the next year. Once

started, your bed will continually enlarge itself, without

further financial output by you.
Choosing a good spot

Grow plants in a sunny area unaffected by tree roots or

tree shade. Berry plants do best in loose soil with added

compost or sand. Make sure the chosen spot has good

drainage; plants sitting in soggy soil will die a slow

death.

I order my berries from www.InBerry.com and receive them

in a leafless dormant state, with plenty of plump roots;

dampened, bagged and in perfect condition, always with 2

or 3 extra plants added in as a bonus per bundle of 25.

Keep new plants in the refrigerator or a cold garage until

you can work the soil outdoors.

With scissors, clip off broken, stray or scraggly roots

and leaves. Then immerse the new plants in a bucket of

water for 15 minutes or so before setting them in the

ground. Soaking gives them a helpful dose of moisture and

protects them from the drying effects of sun, wind and

handling.

If you intend to set out thousands of plants, there is

specialized machinery available for this purpose. But for

the average backyard planting, you will be doing the work

by hand on bended knee.

Prepare the area by discing, plowing, tilling – preferably

the fall before your planting date. Make sure all tough

grass, invasive clover and weeds in general are completely

torn out and gone, and that the soil is soft and rock- and

debris-free.

Mark out straight rows; then with a hoe or trowel, scoop

shallow depressions at 12- to 18-inch intervals. After

spreading out the plant’s root system to resemble a

spider, place it carefully in the shallow hole. Completely

cover the roots with soil, and then tamp the soil down

firmly to eliminate air pockets and ensure good root-soil

contact.

Above the plant roots is a small bump, or “crown.” Don’t

cover the crown with soil, or situate it too high above

the soil level. The crown is the new “plant,” and within

days of being put in its place, it will send out fresh new

emerald-green leaves.
Care of new plants

Water your new plants weekly until well-established. Wait

for sunny days to do their magic, and you’ll soon have a

row of lush, healthy plants. Don’t fertilize at this

point; the new plants are tender and can burn.

In a few weeks, white blossoms appear, often clustered

together on one or two long stems. Check plants

frequently, and with scissors snip off these stems at

ground level. Clipping off the first-year blossoms allows

the plant to channel all its energy into establishing a

root system, rather than trying to produce and ripen

berries.

Keep the bed watered and weeded, as you would any other

garden area. The last item on your task list takes place

in early winter; once the ground is frozen, mulch the

plants lightly with loose straw or other available

material. The mulch protects the plants from the soil’s

pitching and heaving during the alternate cold and warm

spells that inevitably occur between fall and spring.

Second year … harvest

In the spring, check for the first new growth, then

uncover the rows, carefully raking the mulch into

pathways. The mulch protects the plants and ripe berries

from muddy splashes caused by hard rains, and helps stop

disease particles from splattering the leaves. Straw mulch

also makes a pleasant path on which to walk when the

surrounding ground is muddy.

Buds appear, only this time they are not clipped off. The

buds are allowed to bloom, age and drop their petals; and

then, from the tight green-golden flower center, a berry

forms. Warm, dry days are good for berry plants and for

ripening the crop. Excess rain, heat and high humidity can

cause the bright red fruit to turn gray and soggy or to

succumb to mold – a grayish-white fuzzy coating that

covers and shrivels the berry. Too much moisture also

makes large berries with diluted flavor.

Check your patch every day, keeping ripe berries picked to

avoid waste. Each plant should produce about 2 quarts of

berries. Pick the fruit on cool, dry days; place in

shallow containers to avoid squashing. Homegrown berries

are not as crisp as commercially shipped berries. Most

varieties are fairly firm, but they will not stand up well

under excess weight. Also, it is natural for overall berry

size to gradually diminish as the season progresses. The

late season smallest berries have the most intense flavor,

however.

Store berries unwashed in the refrigerator or other cool

area. When ready to use, wash, drain and shuck (remove

stem and leaves). Shucking before washing causes a lot of

juice to leak out and be wasted.
Using your berries

Unfortunately, fresh homegrown berries are available for

only a few short glorious weeks, usually from mid- to late

May until early to mid-June. However, you can enjoy

homegrown strawberries all year round if you preserve

them. Freeze the best berries; make jewel-toned jams or

dry rolls of nutritious fruit leather from the imperfect

ones.

Freezing: Wash, shuck, slice and mix cut berries with

sugar; the more sugar used, the better the keeping

quality. However, the nutrition content will be somewhat

compromised. Frozen berries will keep perfectly for 6

months, and although they are edible after that amount of

time, they will begin to lose quality and flavor. Freeze

berries in plastic storage containers; such containers are

leakproof and stack well in the freezer.

To freeze individually, lay berries in a single layer on

cookie sheets. Once frozen, store in freezer containers.

Jam: Follow the directions on the fruit pectin packages

for canned or freezer jam.

Leather: Purée berries and add a bit of sugar. Pour liquid

onto food dryer racks lined with special fruit roll-up

trays. Dry for about nine hours until firm but not

brittle. Or, spread puréed berries onto sprayed cookie

sheets and dry in low-heat oven overnight.

After the harvest, dry your tears and then get out the

push mower, raising the blade to its highest level.

Ruthlessly mow off old plants, leaves, rotted berries and

all. It’s difficult to do, but it is advantageous to your

patch. It rids the patch of old and possibly diseased

plant material.

Surecrop plants send out an overabundance of runners (I

counted 17 on one busy and prolific mother plant one

year!), which means your patch could actually crowd itself

out by overpopulation quite quickly. Move some of the

runners (next year’s fruiting plants) back into the

original row, and remove any others – especially if

runners venture out any time after August. Even though a

jungle-like green mat of thriving plants looks like a

successful achievement, growing strawberries in this

manner is actually detrimental to good berry production.

The largest, sweetest berries are those growing along the

sunny outer edges of the row. Several narrow rows are more

productive than a large matted row.

Once the patch is mowed, apply a light 10-10-10 or 12-12-

12 fertilizer. Strawberries grow well on most soils and

regular fertilizing really isn’t necessary. One year we

applied too much well-rotted manure to our patch. The

following May the foliage grew so thick that we had to use

the weed trimmer to lop the plants down to allow air and

sunlight to reach the heavily shaded fruits. The fruit was

not ripening but molding.

Keep the patch weeded, watered, and then, once again, when

the ground has frozen hard (usually in January in our

area), apply fresh straw mulch. The patch is put to bed,

but in a few more months – my mouth is already watering

thinking about it – the sun will warm the ground, and tiny

green leaves will poke up, bursting with energy. Plants

bloom, fruit ripens and once again, you have fresh

strawberry shortcake to enjoy.

Biz Reynolds lives on a beef farm in Missouri, worked at

Powell Gardens botanical gardens for 13 years and ran her

own U-Pick strawberry farm for several years. She

currently has a backyard patch of Surecrop berries, since

a person should never be without strawberries.