For 20 years, I’ve raised strawberries on the same plot. I have no way to get to the water. Drouth has caused my few partial failures.
Many need more space to rotate garden crops or plots with strawberries. To them, I offer these tested strawberry-growing suggestions: Stick to recommended varieties, those your station approves, or those that do well in your neighborhood.
Growing Varieties For Spring Strawberry Season
‘Senator Dunlap’ is tops among the several spring-bearers I’ve tried. It withstands winter’s cold and summer’s heat and drouth, bears good size, and good quality berries without excessive coddling, cans, and freezes well, and is a good plant maker.
One can somewhat extend the spring strawberry season by growing a few plants of a late kind. A few plants of any variety on a cold exposed location will be later than the same kind on a sunny slope, especially if the winter mulch is left on late.
Mulching The Bed
My bed is rarely without some mulch. I’ve used straw, com fodder and ground corn cobs, spoiled mill and home-ground feeds, sawdust and wood shavings, peat moss and brooder house manure, strawy hen and cow manure, house, yard, and garden wastes such as pods, peels, clippings, spent plants if they are disease and pest free and green weeds.
Beware of weeds that have mature seeds or vicious habits, like joint and crabgrass, and purslane, which will root and grow if they touch moist soil.
Mulch prevents winter freeze-outs and wet weather erosion, and soil compaction. In addition, it saves moisture to carry the bed through summer drought and heat, makes for a cleaner crop, and checks weeds somewhat.
It takes around 8” inches of mulch to inhibit weeds. That’s fine for briar fruits but too deep for strawberries and will smother them.
Winter Mulch In The Fall
In the fall, the winter mulch is applied after the ground freezes. It should not be of fine materials lest it packs down and smothers plants when the ground is covered with deep snow or an ice sheet.
Too thin a mulch allows plants to start growing on the first warm days. These too-early ones get their blossoms nipped in late freezes. In seasons of abnormally high rainfall, one will need less mulch than usual.
Summertime Mulch
Summertime mulch, a necessity in recent years, poses problems. Grubs thrive in manure mulch.
You’ll likely find a fat white fare if you turn out a wilted plant and examine the roots. Squash him or save for fish bait, as you choose. Grubs abound in sod, too.
After turning a sodded area, it is best to grow another crop first and set strawberries for the second year. Crickets, ants, spiders, and the like love mulch; enough are destructive—dust with chlordane as needed.
The chlordane discourages grasshoppers from locating their egg nurseries in moist soil under the mulch. So it is likely, especially if you’re rural, that the displaced hoppers will move in as soon as farmers harvest early oats and wheat.
Harvest the current crop, then spray with Aldrin or Dieldrin. Twice recently, we have sacrificed parts of current crops to save the parent plants, trees, and shrubs from grasshoppers.
Read and follow all spray directions to the letter. Sprays are often dangerous. Be careful.
Plentiful moisture is a must for strawberries, but they can’t stand soaking feet. Drainage must be reasonable and the soil friable so that water does not stand long.
Cinders and ashes (wood or coal) and the mulch spayed or plowed under before setting the berries help to loosen the soil. Clay primarily responds to this treatment.
My Berry Plot
My berry plot has a protective drainage canal around one end to deter run-off from the hillside above it. Also, in the very soggy ground, it helps to set berries on slight ridges.
I wait until the foliage has dried off during the rainy season before picking berries. It mats the soil down less.
You can prevent soil compaction by using long wide boards along rows and short ones in the beds as step foundations to spread your weight over a larger area. This is helpful, but do not leave the step insulators to encourage termites that are increasingly prevalent and pesty in late years.
Unless forced to by drought or other circumstances, I do not set out strawberry plants. As soon as a plant has borne and produced runnels, guide them as you desire, using clods or mulch for anchors when needed.
Having made a circle of well-rooted plants, as many as there is room for, I destroy the oldster and unwanted runners. As long as the litter is clean and healthy, I leave it on the bed.
My favorite and primary strawberry tool is a narrow-bladed hoe, kept the razor sharp. I use it for thinning.
A slice under the crown will dispose of an old plant, an unwanted one, or one out of place. The little hoe is pleasing too for loosening soil about plants and weed cutting.
Keeping The Bed Productive
This new plant business is the secret of keeping an old bed productive. The best quality and the largest berries are always borne on plants of the previous season’s growth.
Unfortunately, lack of cultivation, fertilizing, or mulching will make the soil in most old beds reluctant and compacted.
Crowding, due to the lack of thinning and renewing of plants, makes good crops impossible. To do its best, every bearing plant must have light, air, room, a sound root system, moisture, nutrition, and protection from insects, diseases, and trampling.
All these are impossible in an old planting which is a neglected one. So go with your strawberries’ requirements, and they’ll do well with you.
Fertilizing Young New Plants For Next Year’s Crop
When young new plants are well started, fertilize them for the following year’s crop. A light dressing with complete garden fertilizer is good anytime there is moisture in the soil.
It can also be applied and watered in or applied with water. Hen and dairy manure, preferably well-rotted, do nicely. I usually combine garden fertilizer and farm manure, using a little each year.
Applying fertilizer in the spring makes for too much foliage and does not increase yields. The strength that enables a plant to yield well is stored within the wintered-over plant.
Too much foliage is terrible: the shaded berries rot and ripen unevenly, plants mat down in picking, and there are too many hiding spots for unwelcome tenants.
When an occasional vacant spot occurs in my bed, I turn the soil and grow some other item. Sometimes I transplant a few vegetable thinnings.
Often I grow a few onions, potatoes, or sweet potatoes in such spots or on the edges of the mulched bed. The soil seems to benefit from such a hardworking schedule.
Last year my unmulched garden was a near-failure, but I had spots of good garden sass among the strawberries and raspberries.
44659 by Sadie G. Lasley