How to Grow Strawberries that Taste Wonderful

Types of Strawberries You Can Grow

There are several different kinds of strawberries available, and unfortunately the labeling you see when you find them in nurseries is not always accurate. Apart from wild or alpine strawberries, there are three kinds of strawberries which give the delicious, juicy red fruit we know and love:

June-Bearers: these are the traditional strawberry plants which fruit in - surprise! - June in their traditional growing areas, crop heavily for a few weeks, and then stop fruiting for the rest of the year. This type is best if you want lots of strawberries in a short time, maybe for making jam or drying for winter. June-bearers produce the most runners. They come in early, mid and late-season varieties, so the "June" in their name is not necessarily accurate about when you'll get fruit.

Ever-bearing: this type produces several "flushes" of fruit during spring, summer and fall, but not as much at once as June-bearers.

Day-Neutral Strawberries produce a continuous trickle of berries over the whole season, in some years in my garden right into November. They are great if you want a bowl of strawberries every few days, but you don't need a lot all at once. Day Neutral and Everbearing varieties are often marked as all Everbearing in nurseries.

Strawberry Varieties

There are far too many varieties available for me to list them all here. Be aware, though, that different varieties are adapted to different climate regions. If you buy your plants from a local nursery rather than a chain store, or you get them from a neighbor, you are likely to get a variety which is well adapted locally. Here are some good resources for varieties:

This Wikipedia page has a long list of varieties showing whether they are early, mid or late season June-bearers, everbearing, or day neutral.

Organic Gardening Magazine has a good list of disease-resistant June-bearing varieties and the regions they grow best in.

And here's a list of varieties by state for the USA.

Methods for Growing Strawberries

You can grow strawberries in a number of different ways:

1. Right in the ground, in a wide row or bed. This is the traditional method and there are several different styles. Mainly, you plant a single or multiple row of plants, then either remove the runners and keep to the original plants, or let all the runners root and grow within the boundaries of a wide strip or bed. Removing runners is more work but the bed is more controlled. Letting runners root and grow results in what's called a "matted row", a very accurate description.

2. In a raised bed, either on the ground or up on legs. This is very good if you have badly drained or alkaline soil, because it means you can adjust the soil and drainage in the bed to the strawberries' liking. It can also help with keeping the plants confined to a linited area.

3, In a container, either a special strawberry pot with openings in the sides, or a regular pot. A single strawberry plant will be reasonably happy in a gallon pot, or you can use a bigger pot and plant several plants. Strawberry pots are very decorative in their own right and create a very compact way to grow strawberries.

4. Any of the above methods can be used to produce early strawberries by adding some weather protection: cloches are traditional, but I have grown strawberries in my hoophouse in BC, Canada and harvested fruit about 6 weeks early. If you have your strawberries planted in containers you could bring some into a sunroom or greenhouse to get early fruit.

Choosing a Location

Strawberries need good, moist soil with good drainage (so sandy or loamy soils are preferred), pH of 5.5 - 7 (that's slightly acid to neutral) and plenty of sun (unless you are growing in a very hot location). Since they like to spread, it's also a good idea to give them extra space from the beginning. A location with plenty of ventilation is also useful, to keep molds and fungus diseases at bay.

Strawberry plants are winter hardy in many places, but start to have trouble where temperatures go below 10-20 degrees F. In areas with warm or hot climates they can be a winter, spring or fall crop.

Because strawberries are badly affected by verticillium wilt, it's recommended that you don't plant where other crops that tend to get verticillium have previously grown. That means raspberries and tomato-family plants: tomatoes, eggplants, peppers and potatoes. However, if you're certain that there's no verticillium in your soil, you don't need to worry about that.

Getting Your Strawberry Plants

There are three main ways to get strawberry plants.

1. From a nursery. They come either in bundles/boxes of 10-20 plants, or potted up. The bundled plants often look pretty sad, with only a few tufts of leaves at the top, but in fact they establish and grow on very well. Potted strawberry plants are ridiculously expensive in comparison - only buy them if they are the only thing you can find, or if you only want one or two.

2. From a neighbor: most people who have strawberries growing in the ground are overrun with runners (baby plants). You can often get some for free, or pick them up at garage sales. The downsides with this cheap method are that you will often have no idea what variety you are getting, or even what type, and it's possible to bring in diseases with the plants.

3. Grow them from seed: some seed companies sell seed for special varieties, such as Thompson& Morgan but you can also apparently save strawberry seed and grow plants from them - something I didn't know until today! If you give it a try, let me know how you get on.

Preparing the Soil

Strawberries like loamy, well-drained soil, a bit on the acid side. So, if you have sandy soil, that's a good start: add organic matter like compost, or composted manure, check the pH and adjust it if necessary, and you are good to go. If your soil is clay, you can amend it with lots of organic matter to loosen it up, or make a raised bed and fill it with loam so you're not really using the clay soil at all. Just make sure that water can drain away out of the bottom of the raised bed.

If you use manure, you may not need any fertilizer: otherwise I like to use a complete dry organic ferilizer.

Dig the ground over well, breaking up any big lumps, and mix in any soil amendments you are using. If I am making a new bed from scratch I often use my Mantis mini-tiller to do the initial hard work, but if you already have an established growing area, a fork will do the job without destroying existing soil structure as much.

An alternative to digging is to use a sheet-mulching or "lasagna bed" method. While this method does mean you don't have to do heavy digging, for a bed of any size you need a LOT of organic materials, and it can be as much work gathering and stacking it as digging would have been. For a smallish bed, lasagna methods are very good. I have built a large garden using this method and it does indeed work well and grow good plants.

When to Plant Strawberries

In most areas, strawberries are planted in the spring, and that's when they appear in nurseries and at plant sales. Ideally, you want to plant after the last frost but before spring rains end: in practice, young strawberry plants will take a light frost with no damage, and you can always water them if there's no rain. If you can, pick a cool, overcast day with rain forecast to let the young plants get a few roots working before the hot sun comes out again. Strawberries do prefer some cool spring weather to get properly rooted before summer heat comes on.

In some hot-summer areas, strawberries are best planted in the fall. Ask around your local nurseries or Master Gardeners and they will tell you when is best.

Bunched plants with bare roots benefit from having their roots wetted and allowed to soak up water the day before planting. Don't let them sit in water more than a few hours, though: you don't want to drown them! Keep them damp until planting time.

Planting Your Strawberries

OK, so you have your plants, and the bed all prepared: it's a cool, cloudy day: you're ready to plant! Gather your tools and materials:

Plants
Hand trowel
Watering can or bucket full of water (this can be very dilute manure or compost tea if you like)
Some compost

There's a little bit or preparation needed for the plants:

For rooted runners, separate them out so you can see how big the rootballs are and so they are not all matted together. Snip off any dead or rotten leaves, stalks, roots or old runner stems.

If you have bare-root plants in bunches or boxes, separate them out, discard any totally dead ones, snip off dead or rotten leaves, stalks, roots or old runner stems, and trim any wildly long roots so you can fit them in the planting hole without curling them around. If you have more plants than you'll need, pick out the best and healthiest-looking to plant now.

Potted plants can be removed from their pots one at a time as you come to plant them - as for the others, trim off dead or rotten leaves, stalks, roots or old runner stems. If the roots have started to circle round and round in the pot, pull them out and if necessary trim some off.

OK, now we can actually get these babies in the ground!

For each plant, dig a hole with your trowel, large enough to take the rootball or the spread-out bare roots, plus a bit, and deep enough that the plant will be at the same level it was growing before, plus a bit deeper.

Add a trowel of compost to the bottom of the hole, and mix it in a bit.

Place your plant in the hole, If it's a bare-root plant, spread the roots out in the hole. You want them to be pointing outwards, not circling around in the hole. Set the plant so the crown (where the leaves spring from) is level with the ground. You can tuck some more compost under the plant if you need to, to get it at the right level.

Water in the plant by filling the hole almost to the top with water (this is also called "puddling in", a very descriptive and accurate term!)

Fill in the hole around the plant with the soil you dug out in the first place, and firm round the plant with your hands. "Firm" means to press down enough that the roots are in solid contact with the soil, but not so hard that you press out all the air spaces.

Once you have all your plants in, you may well have some spares. Resist the temptation to stuff them into the bed anyway: pot them up in some compost and keep them to one side to replace any that die, to give away, or to plant in a strawberry pot - see "Growing Strawberries in Pots", below.

Newly planted strawberries need to put their energy into growing roots and leaves, not berries, so now comes the painful part: for 6 weeks after planting, you should pick off all the blossoms! The plants won't die if you don't do this, but they will give more fruit in succeeding years if you do.

Strawberries grow very well in pots, both special strawberry pots and medium-to-large standard containers.

Some strawberry varieties are better suited to pots than others: they usually have fruit that dangles on longer stems, rather than being held upright, and they produce fewer runners. Day Neutral or Everbearing varieties are usually better choices than June-bearers as they have fewer runners and will give you a longer harvest, but of smaller fruits. Check with the nursery where you buy your strawberry plants and see what they recommend.

Your choice of pot is simple: as large as you have space for and can afford! A special strawberry pot has holes in the sides for extra plants, so you can pack more into a small footprint. If you use a regular pot, bear in mind that it only needs to be about a foot deep: a large window box is a good choice. You can also plant several strawberry plants in a hanging basket, both on top and through the sides.

Soil in a container needs to be a kind that does not pack down, so don't use soil straight from the garden. There are dozens of commercial potting mixes available, or you can mix your own like I do from garden compost, peat or coir, and vermiculite or perlite. If you want to try this, check out my "Making Potting Soil" Youtube video for full instructions

Strawberries in containers need the same kind of care as strawberries in the ground, they just need it more often!

Containers in the sun usually need watering every day unless you have some kind of drip irrigation system set up. I have one for my garden and my containers, and I highly recommend it as a time- and plant-saver!

You'll also need to fertilize your plants once they have been in the container for a while. Organic gardeners can use compost or manure tea or diluted fish fertilizer, while there are many slow-release or liquid chemical fertilizers available.

Watering

Strawberries do not like to dry out. They need 1-2" of water a week, and benefit from using a soaker hose or drip system to soak the roots deeply without wasting a lot of water.

Mulching

To conserve water, keep the soil damp, and keep the fruit clean, many people mulch their strawberries, either with organic materials or black or red plastic. Good organic materials to use include straw and grass clippings. If you use grass clippings, use them dry (up to 2" thick) or in a very thin layer if they are fresh. Fresh grass clippings piled too thick will heat up as they decompose, due to the high nitrogen content, and damage the strawberry plants. Once the thin layer has dried out, though, you can add another thin layer, etc.

Black or red plastic mulches are usually applied to the bed first, then the plants are planted into holes in the mulch. Black mulch warms the soil and keeps weeds down and berries clean. Red mulch was shown in studies to increase fruit production for strawberries and tomatoes, but when I tried it didn't notice any difference. I prefer not to use plastic mulches.

Don't use clear plastic as mulch! It will cook your soil and the plant roots!

If you have major slug problems, you may not be able to mulch at all. Try mulching part of the patch and see how it goes.

Fertilizing

If you fertilized when planting, the plants should have plenty to see them through the first few months. June bearers need fertilizing after they have been cut back after fruiting. Day Neutrals and Everbearers can be fertilized after the first flush of fruit has died down. Don't fertilize to close to the cold weather: you don't want soft new growth to go into the winter with.

Propagation

Strawberries want to take over the world, like most plants, and they do it by means of runners: long stringy stalks which grow a baby plant every so often along their length. If the baby plant finds soil it will grow roots and, once established, can be cut away from its parent plant and grown on into a new fruiting plant.

Pests and Diseases

Rather than go into a lot of detail here, I'll cover a few points and then point you to the Wikipedia strawberry diseases page, a horrifying read. Many states and provinces also have strawberry disease and pest references on their agricultural web sites, which offer information specific to your area.

Birds love strawberries as much as people do. The traditional protection for this is to take clear glass jars and slip them over the ripening fruit trusses. This allows the sun to continue ripening the berries while foiling the birds. Make sure water can't pool in the bottom of the jar and rot the fruit. If you have a large strawberry patch this gets tedious, and a good alternative is to build a frame that holds netting over the whole bed. If you grow a lot of fruit of different kinds, and have trouble with birds, try the idea of a fruit cage: a netting enclosure for ALL your small fruits, with a netting roof high enough for people to walk around inside, and a door to go in by.

Slugs love strawberries as much as birds and people do. Use your usual slug-battling methods. Mine include copper strips round the edge of the bed, and hand-picking with a flashlight at night.

All photos are either my own, or are used under licence from sxc.hu