We use strawberries as edible ground covering in one of our ornamental landscaped beds. It is lush and beautiful even if not covered in berries and goes nicely with the boxwoods. The leaves are edible and make a great tea as well.
My mom got me a hanging basket of strawberries about 4 years ago and this year it just wasn’t doing much, so I chopped them up and used them as filler for a big pot that now has a beautiful San Marzano tomato, some basil, and carrots growing in it
Excellent video! I've been growing strawberries like a reckless noob for about 10 years, sometimes being rewarded with huge, juicy jewels and other times getting disappointingly small, sparse harvests. Now I know why and what to do about it!
I'm jealous of the folks who can grow strawberries. We have far too many squirrels and chipmunks here because of all our walnut trees and the critters love strawberries just as much as we do. I haven't found a solution to cover them that will work. I suppose I could make a frame cover with steel hardware cloth but it would be heavy and inconvenient to move each time I wanted to harvest some berries. Luckily, we have u-pick strawberry fields just down the road.
I have Alpine strawberries everywhere! Didn't realize they were in the grass until we planted pear and cherry trees. The runners are constantly invading the space. It started with one plant at the side of the house. Well now we've made a bed and want to plant bigger strawberries so your channel is very helpful. Thanks for all the info.😊 Tottenham Ontario Canada🙏❤️🇨🇦
I plunked some ever-bearing seedlings in my rhubarb tub the first year I had my house (15 years ago) in hopes of having strawberries and rhubarb for crumbles, but they don't seem to produce at the same time here on the Rock (St. John's). They've run over the side of the tub and occasionally I get a few strawberries before the slugs eat them, but I've never given them much thought. You just taught me a half-dozen things about strawberries that I never knew. I might give them their own plot and see if I can get something going for next year. (Thanks for the tip about keeping mulch corralled in the wind.)
Do you have an aphid problem by chance? One of the gardens I worked on had a very hard time producing strawberries. I theorize the aphids were weakening the plant and making it more susceptible to other pests taking the strawberries before they could be harvested. We had a lot of aphid farming ants on them.
I think chamomile might be a good option as a sacrificial crop for aphids. The ones I have in my current garden are attracting a lot of aphids to them and hopefully away from my strawberries and other crops. The flowers are also hopefully attracting lady bugs, parasitic wasps, and other beneficial insects. This is my first year growing chamomile so that’s just my speculation from what I’ve noticed this year.
Off subject, but I just had to let you know how much my family and I loved your chocolate chip cookie recipe! I made it last week and subbed a flax egg and used vegan butter and veg shortening instead of the lard and butter. Sprinkled sea salt flakes on top. Delicious! Truly crispy, soft and chewy all at the same time. Our new favorite cookie recipe. ❤️ Now back to the strawberries! 😂
Do the older strawberries still produce runners after they stop producing berries? I’m wondering if I could separate them to another section dedicated to propagating runners.
Quick info re: hay vs straw - they're two entirely different crops & gardeners can make choices about which to use if they have thoughts on how each crop is managed. - Hay is from a hay field, which you can think of as a pasture-meadow of grasses and forbs that have been left to grow tall, or a field planted out to timothy hay or alfalfa hay etc (which costs more per bale because it was purchased seed and required the farmer's time & labour beyond harvest, as well as extra equipment they might not otherwise own if they're in livestock rather than in broad-acre growing). Depending on the farmer, it may or may not have been sprayed with something to manage undesirable plants in the mix. I don't know the ins and outs of it, but at least some of those products are persistant, meaning that they are still active after harvest and even after a year of storage. If you use that hay on your garden, the persistant herbicide/whatever will not only harm your plants but also potentially contaminate your soil and potentially continue to cause problems in future years. It's bad. ONLY use hay if you can confirm from the *farmer* that it was unsprayed by these products. - Straw is the stems, primarily, of a broad-acre farmer's grain crop such as wheat. The stems of commercial grain crops have to be tougher than other grasses, to hold the weight of the huge seeds of mature grain so it can ripen in the air (subject to rot and pests if it sagged to the ground) & be efficiently harvested by machine. Unless the farmer is growing a crop with organic practices, it's almost certain that it was sprayed to control for pests and disease (fungicides mostly, I think) and it's reasonably likely that when the farmer was ready to harvest it, they sprayed it with glyphosate to kill the crop all at the same time (otherwise some plants will senesce earlier, some will senesce later, which might mean they end up with a less "good quality" yield than they could otherwise obtain, depending on growing conditions/harvesting conditions). Grains are allowed to be sprayed with glyphosate and still be sold for human consumption because only the inner kernel is eaten, so theoretically all of the glyphosate on the surface of the kernel is removed in the dehulling/whatever process. BUT - herbicides generally kill grasses, and grain is a grass, so glyphosate is only used at harvest time. This means some weeds likely grew along with the grain crop, which means weeds were harvested along with the grain, which means there are some weeds, and their seeds, present in the straw. Just... much less (as is rightly said in this video). If the straw is mostly seed-free, it's because the farmer is either growing a Roundup-Ready GMO crop so they could spray Roundup to get rid of everything but the GMO crop (& then kill the crop with another glyphosate that the GMO crop isn't able to tolerate at harvest time), or if it's not a GMO crop, they sprayed a herbicide that targeted specific kinds of non-grass plant (so the straw might contain grass weed seeds). The sprays used on conventionally-grown grain crops are not persistant the way the products are that are sprayed on hay, but of course plenty of gardeners don't want any residue from those sprays brought into their garden at all. Anyway. Just be aware of the differences of the crops and how they're managed.
Was speaking with my neighbour (he makes hay and straw), says they’ll be using even stronger chemicals this year because the old ones have become useless due to immunity 😳
My biggest problem is strawberry plants having sooo many runners even the second year. If I had a good berry for each runner I would fill a bowl. Giving it one more try and next year is do or die to give me more than a handful of berries at a time.
