How To Grow Strawberries At Home In Pots or In a Raised Bed Garden For Beginners - 7 Easy Steps

Hey, are you looking to grow strawberries at home, maybe in pots on your balcony or deck or in your garden, maybe in a raised bed? In this quick detail to the point video, I'm going to take you through how to grow strawberries in seven easy steps. This is Tim. Organic backyard gardening is focused on helping you grow more food with our tips and tricks. If you like gardening and want to grow more food, subscribe to this channel. Before we get into it, why grow strawberries? Over the years, I've grown strawberries in raised beds. And this year I've noticed an increase in interest in new growers looking to grow strawberries. A majority of customers building their custom garden plans with Plan My Garden are including strawberries in their plans. And there's probably a good reason for this. Strawberry prices, especially organic continue to rise and strawberries are not like your typical annual garden plants. They are perennials, meaning once you plant them, they'll continue to produce yearly, but they also multiply too. Strawberry plants create new stems called runners from the main plant. And once the runners root into the soil, they establish a daughter plant and this process keeps multiplying. But if you are able to keep these plants tidy and in check, they will provide you with berries with flavors. You'll never be able to find in a grocery store, making them a great addition to any outdoor growing space. So let's get into it. Choosing types. There are several different types of berries you can choose from. And within those types, there are many different varieties. The three primary types are one summer fruiting, also known as June bearing varieties. These produce a single harvest mostly in June, but keep producing into July. They are affected by day length. The second type is day neutral, also known as ever bearing varieties. These are not affected by day length and they produce fruit midsummer through fall. Now the third are Alpine strawberries, also day neutral. They can be grown from seed and are great for pots. They are tiny, but they're tasty and they produce over a lengthy period. Now the next step is figuring out how to start them. There are three options. You can start them from seeds. You can start them from bare roots or you can start them from buying a plant. So let's go through the three options. So starting from seed means you'll need to start them indoors and transplant them out. Bare roots are live roots that you get from a mail order catalog and you plant them right away in pots or in the garden. And the last option is going to a nursery and finding live plants. Then you can transplant these into your garden or into a pot. If you're going with June bearing or ever bearing, the best method is to purchase already started plants at a nursery or buy bare roots at a seed starting catalog. I have personally bought the strawberry plant collection from Johnny Seeds here in the United States. These are bare roots and the collection includes three different varieties of ever bearing roots, 25 each of early glow, which is an early season, jewel, which is a mid season and sparkle, which is a mid to late season. For large plantings, you may find it fun to plant multi varieties that fruit at different times for longer harvest. These came out to about a dollar per bare root. Buying already started plants in a nursery may be a little bit more expensive than this. So if you're looking to plant a lot of strawberries, bare roots may be a little bit more economical. As far as the smaller Alpine berries, it's best to start by seeds, but you might be lucky to find some at a nursery already started. When starting from seed, they'll produce the following spring, but you could be lucky and get some production that first fall. Now, what type of location do we want? Well, strawberries need a fertile soil that is well drained. I amend my garden beds with plenty of compost before planting. They also need full sun, but partial shade is okay. So now that we talked about the different ways to start them, where we're going to place them, the varieties, how do we plant them? So let's go through the options for bare root plants. You want to transplant them into the garden or in a pot. As soon as you receive them in the case of bare roots from Johnny seeds, they ship them weekly from March through mid May, starting with the Southern states first. They give you an available shipment in weeks based on your location. When I was just looking at this, they gave me a five week span from about two weeks before my last expected frost to three weeks after my last expected frost. I assume other seed catalogs do the same, but I've really only had experience with Johnny seeds for strawberries. When planting them into the garden, it's best to keep them contained to a single area or bed. You can plant them four per one square foot. You don't want to plant the bare roots too deep where the arrow is pointing to is the crown. You don't want to bury the crown. You want the soil level to be slightly below the crown. You can also plant on a mound. This is preferred because it helps with drainage for the roots and it prevents most of the fruits from laying directly on the soil. Mulch around them. As soon as you plant them with straw or dead leaves, this will keep the moisture in, in the weeds suppress. Mulch also keeps the berries clean. If starting Alpine berries from seeds, start them indoors about eight weeks before the last expected frost. Instead starting flats with seed starting mix, keep them moist and a constant temperature around 60 to 75 Fahrenheit. They'll germinate in about two to three weeks. When they developed about two set of leaves, you can up pot them to four inch pots. Now if you're going to be keeping these in containers, you can transplant them directly to that final container. When putting them into the final pot, you want to make sure you're using good potting soil. You don't want to use guarding soil, which would become too compacted. If you're making your own potting soil, you can use compost with a little bit of vermiculite and perlite. You can set them outside right around your last expected frost date. For pot selection, strawberries have fairly small root balls. They can be grown in pots as small as 10 inches to 12 inches in diameter and eight inches deep. However, note that the smaller the container, the more frequently you'll need to water the plant. Also, strawberries don't like extremely hot temperatures. So it's recommended that you choose a light color pot or container if you live in a hot climate. Step five, what to do after they're planted. Flowering. Some say to pull off all the flowers the first year to encourage the plant to put energy into becoming more established, putting more energy into the root. I didn't do this and I had some berries the first year and more the second year and third year. I did, however, make sure that I cut off any new runners before the daughter plants could get established. These daughter plants leach energy out of the main plant. So it's important to keep things tidy. Six, protecting and harvesting. As soon as your fruit sets in, critters are going to be interested in your delicious fruit. You might need to cover them to prevent them from being gobbled up. I found the chipmunks loved mine. This netting stopped them. See my other video link up above on how to protect berries for more detailed walkthrough. For harvesting, harvest them whenever they are fully red and before they turn very dark. You may also slice and freeze them if you're lucky enough to have extras. Now for the last step. If you're enjoying this video, give it a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe. The last step is putting your bed to rest for the end of the year to ensure production the following year. At the end of the year, remove all the runners and mulch the plant with straw or shredded leaves. In the spring, pull back the straw to leave the plants exposed, but leave the mulch in between the plants to suppress weeds. Healthy plants can be productive for three to five years if kept tidy. I found that plants became less productive and died after about three years for me. You can replant the bed from new runners, or you may find it easier to replace the bed with new bare roots at this time. Don't forget to amend the bed with fresh compost. So are you growing strawberries this year? What varieties did you select? Let me know in the comments below. Also, if you need any help planning your garden, check out our plan my garden tool. Your zip code, draw your garden layout, select what vegetables you want to grow and how much space you want to allocate to each. Check it out. And then we'll send you an email with a PDF that has a visual schedule for each vegetable you selected, a getting started guide, a grow guide for each vegetable selected in your garden layout, updated with optimal plant placements for maximum yields.