It was really nice out on the Farm this morning. Sunny and cool, around 25 degrees. But it climbed to maybe fifty-five by lunch time. So we tore into the long and tedious job of removing last year's strawberry plants from our Market Garden for replanting into our Strawberry field.
The field itself isn't ready to plant, with the exception of the one vertical Strawberry tower. The septic system drain field went in under where the strawberry field is going to be, so right now we have about four inches of wet clay. Not a good thing to put plants into unless you like root rot. But we have a plan . . .
Since we haven't built the entire vertical garden, and probably won't this year, we are going to plant our berries in low berms of pretty good soil placed on top of the clay. The berms will be about three feet wide and about six inches deep. This will allow our plants to get into production this year, just as they did last year, but much earlier. We will need to put out a whole lot of berms because we have a whole lot of plants.
I took our little tractor and shaved last year's strawberries off of the dirt where they were planted in last year, each load takes up about eight square feet and this comes up like a sheet off of the clay layer. Then we carried them over to the workshop, where we make dirt, and separate the plants from the soil, then sorted them for size. Some of our plants are three years old, but most are the result of our letting the 284 three year old plants run crazy last year. Strawberry plants make babies by seed and by runner. If you let the runners go crazy the fruits are greatly diminished. Each runner can make one new plant right away, but often the runners will continue on and make even more. We got a lot more because we didn't hope for much of a fruit crop last year. What we needed was to propagate our 284 plants into something more scaled up to farm needs.
Each tractor scoop held about eight square feet of plants and dirt. Each square foot held about ten plants. We sorted eight scoops this morning and got about 480 plants for the effort. Most were small because they were only a few seasons old. Some were very large, about the size a commercial grower would want. But this morning was just the start of it.
All totaled we have something like 450 square feet of strawberry plants to scrape up, sort out, and re-plant,. So we'll be planting as many as 4500 plants this year. This is quite a lot more than we ever dreamed of when we put them in late last Spring. Each new plant will take about one quarter of a square foot of dirt to grow properly. This is a bit closer than some think ought to be because when fungus gets loose you can lose a whole bunch of plants. But if we keep up on the mulch we probably won't have too much trouble.
So the whole new batch of plantings will take about 750 row feet of space, three feet wide, about 2500 square feet. Our strawberry field is about 10,000 square feet, so we would still need to propagate or buy more plants if we wanted them to stay in the ground, but we don't. Right now we are leaning towards buying new pants because we may wish to opt for some more specific outcomes. But the mixed berries we now have may do the trick. I think people won't mind picking strawberries and probably won't know the difference in breed. But growing in the dirt, as does everyone else, is not where we wish to go.
In-ground strawberry production is very problematic. You have to do a heck of a lot of bending, a ton of watering, and some degree of feeding or medicating if the soil changes. Then there's the problem of picking which is best left to those who bend easier than we do or are more motivated by less money than most are. It may be that if we tried to operate the field as a Upick the people would come, but all would leave with soiled knees and most will not likely return. The current strawberry Upicks are more about family recreation and not about a good substitution for supplying needs.
So we plan to put them all up in vertical towers, like the one we built to prove it might be done. This would make Upick more about fun.
Our single eight foot test tower holds about 86 plants and uses up only nine linear (or square feet) of space. The same number of conventionally panted strawberries would take up around ten row feet of space (six feet wide), so this is better if it works. Space is better, but the extra good stuff is that the tower system uses about half the water, none of the fertilizer, and almost no bending over. Operating the towers as a Upick would keep customers happier, off of the ground, and picking fruit would take half the time and half of the effort.
Only time will tell if the dream of our strawberry farm pans out, but I'll keep you all informed.
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