Why grow your own strawberries? Unfortunately, commercially-farmed strawberries are one of the crops most heavily sprayed with toxic pesticides. In addition, you will probably never taste truly delicious, sweet, fully ripe strawberries unless you grow them yourself. So, if you’re tired of paying high prices for unripe, bland, oversized strawberries with white flesh, maybe it’s time to do just that.
June-Bearing varieties provide a concentrated crop with large harvests throughout June, good for making preserves, strawberry shortcakes, etc. Ever-bearing and ‘day-neutral’ varieties produce small but more continuous crops through the summer, good for snacking.
Why plant them now? This might surprise you: strawberry plants set their buds in the winter for flowering and fruiting the following summer. So the plants you put in now will bear fruit sooner than if you wait until spring to plant. Each strawberry plant can bear fruit for five or six years if properly managed. Planting new strawberry plants now can give you an excellent berry crop in 2027 if you follow a few basic instructions.
1. Plant 6 to 8 weeks prior to average first hard freeze.
2. Choose a location that receives 6 to 8 hours of full sun.
3. Prepare planting bed: Soil should be loose, well-drained, rich and moist, with compost mixed in. If using composted manure, make sure it does not have a highly alkaline pH. Strawberries thrive best in slightly acidic soils with pH of 5.5 to 6.5, which is hard to achieve here (our native soils and our water tend to be alkaline). The addition of soil life through mycorrhizal inoculation, compost and compost tea, helps mitigate the negative
effects of alkalinity by making minerals available to plants. Compost also helps with moisture retention. Adding some Worm Compost will increase phosphorus and potassium, and to improve soil moisture retention and aeration and enhance beneficial microbe habitat, incorporate a 1” to 2” layer of expanded shale along with the compost.
4. Do not fertilize strawberry plants at planting time.
5. Remove all runners from plants by snipping off with clean pruners. As plants grow, continue to remove runners as soon as they appear. In about their fifth year, you can allow a few runner to develop and replace older plants.
6. Strawberry roots are shallow and lateral, requiring only about 6” soil depth. Set plants 18” to 24” apart. Do not bury the crown or set it too high. The crown is the point from which all of the leaf stems emerge. It should be right at the level of the soil prior to mulching.
7. Mulch with straw or dried, seed-free grass clippings.
8. Fertilize June-bearing strawberries like ‘Early-Glow’ in early autumn with a balanced, granular, slow-release organic fertilizer such as Happy Frog All-Purpose (6-4-5), Down ToEarth Vegetable Garden fertilizer 4-4-4), or their Acid Mix. Fertilize ever-bearing and day-neutral varieties when their fruiting season has ended.
9. Be sure to water strawberry plants in winter. Dig down 2” to check for moisture.
10. While fruiting, protect your strawberry bed from critters like deer, squirrels, raccoons and birds.
11. Top-dress in fall with a thin layer of compost.