July 4th, 2018 Strawberry Fields Forever

Yesterday we found one perfect strawberry out in MacGreggors Garden. It was large, nearly ripe, and the only berry we have had (so far) worthy of its name.

 So we ate it.

We have been trying to raise strawberries, like the one we ate, for a few years. So far having little success. In truth, the berries we put in at the old house went wild and did better than any intentional action we took.

Strawberries were always a part of the plan to get people to come to the Farm. But we are doing all of this without any real experience, so we have to do much of it by trial and error.  When we began thinking seriously about raising Strawberries, we bought one-hundred plants in four varieties.

Each of the many dozens of type of Strawberry plant has its own characteristics. Some varieties are "everbearing" and should produce the whole warm season, some only produce seasonally.  Some are red throughout, some have white centers. Some plants make little berries, some make them as big as your fist. We chose our plants by reading up on them and deciding which might do well.

Our failed experiment.

I am a big fan of vertical farming for berries, but this can be tricky since there isn't many examples of the practice to follow along behind. We made special planters for the four hundred plants we bought and put them out into the garden. The idea was to turn the barrels slightly every day and distribute the sunshine evenly and our hope was to build rows of these. But the barrels turned out to be a buster. We got half a pie out of them before giving up. The barrels didn't seem to let the plants behave as they should, heat built up and the plants struggled.

Eventually we had to give up on the idea and the plants were left to fend for themselves until we planned our permanent move to the Farm about a year ago. Since then our Strawberry plants have had a rough year.

• They were removed from our garden barrels and put into one gallon pots where they struggled without being tended, fed, or otherwise noticed very much.
• Then we moved the pots into the greenhouse (once it was finished) and took them out of the pots where they lay stacked tightly in low planting flats, waiting over two months for planting.
• We moved them from the flats into the Garden a bit late in the planting season and into brand new soils which were not quite ripe for planting.
• And, once in the garden, they were viciously attacked by gophers and moles which ate their roots and knocked them out of the soil. We replanted some of them three and four times.
• All the while our dogs ran through the garden and some were torn from the ground and had to be replanted.

Our plants are beginning to produce,
but we have no idea about plant variety.

Once they were relieved of all this adversity, the soil cooled down by time so that they could grow, they have begun to thrive. Most plants have become these wonderfully bushy things with shiny leaves and many runner babies. It is from this that our first strawberry came. We just wish we knew what sort of plant it came from.

When we bought the starts a few years ago, we had each plant location carefully mapped to see which variety would do the best in the barrels we had built for them. But as time went along, and we moved the plants out of the barrels, we got them pretty jumbled and lost track of which plant belonged to each variety, so we really don't know which plant is of what variety. It could be that keeping the varieties separated won't have any down-side. It could be that the Farm dictates what happens there and, no matter how carefully we plan, things will always get jumbled.

Each and every strawberry variety is good enough for people, but this lack of knowing might become a problem when we eventually build the permanent strawberry fields in the East Meadow. For now we will simply accept what comes of the field we have. And so far only one berry has shown up. But it was a good one and others just might show up.

We are planning to build a "vertical" Strawberry field.

One type of vertical Strawberry farm.

This is where the we put the plant rows into stacking planters. The idea is to allow people to pick the rows without having to get down on the ground or spend time bending over.  There are many types of vertical Strawberry farms. Some are pyramids, some are stacked pots, some are hydroponic, most are in commercial greenhouses. The design we want to try is a large hanging planter set-up with its own built-in greenhouse cover so that the plants are protected in Winter. These are placed into rows and look like they would be nice to stroll through. I'll build one of these in the next few months to see how it works.

No matter how, what, or when, we will take what we are given. The one berry was delicious.