How To Properly Plant & Propagate Strawberries

Your June-bearing plants will produce fruit for approximately a month. They produce all of their fruit at once and then they go dormant. These plants typically produce larger berries but of course you get a smaller quantity.

Everbearing varieties will produce multiple flushes of berries throughout the growing season. These berries are typically smaller in size. Although you should get more of them.

I have grown strawberries every possible way you can imagine. Even in gutters! I thought I would prefer this method because I have such a terrible Ant & Roly Poly (pill bugs) problem.

I have tried all kinds of hanging baskets, vertical containers, etc… but I have a really hard time keeping the plants moist enough when growing up out of the ground. So I tend to prefer my raised beds. I have discovered several tricks for combatting the pests over the years!

•  Grow them near the edge of the bed. If you can drape the actual berry over the side of your bed, it really helps keep the bugs off!
•  Use EZ Straw mulch around your plants and mulch heavily. I tend to have fewer pill bugs and ants around my strawberries when I have plenty of thick ez straw mulch around the plants.
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•  If you still struggle with something nibbling on your berries, you can purchase a big pkg of these mesh bags for a very cheap price!
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•  If you have birds or rabbits, you can use this type of bird netting. I did use this one year but because of our high winds and my very productive garden, it became a hassle trying to get under the netting every single day so I could harvest the berries. I haven’t needed to use it in a few years but it is great to have on hand, just in case the birds or rabbits get bad again!
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•  Another thing you can use are these plastic cradles. They are very cheaply made and probably not worth the price you have to pay for them (I’m very frugal, sorry!) BUT you can buy them in multi-packs these days. When I bought my first one, several years ago, I couldn’t find multi-packs and I think I paid $7 for one cradle. I have seen 10 – 20 packs for under $20 so that price is definitely getting a little better.

 As far as gutters go, if you are going to do that I can’t stress enough, the importance of hooking drip irrigation up to your plants. Depending on your climate, you may need to water your plants multiple times a day if you choose to grow them this way. That’s because in these shallow containers, they have no where to go to suck up more moisture. Plus the soil dries out much more quickly.

 Whereas, in a raised bed, even if I’m running my drip daily (which I do in the hottest part of the year), at least my plants can spread their roots out further or deeper into the soil when they are thirsty.

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