Growing Strawberries in Our Garden

I think the only people that don't like strawberries are those with allergies to them and maybe two other people in the whole world. Does it sound like I like strawberries or what.

I started growing strawberries with just one strawberry plant. I put it into a small container and in about a week it had outgrown the container, so I put it into a container that was more than foot across and a foot and half deep but it still out grew that container so I put it into one of our raised flower beds and let it go.

We were told to pinch off any new strawberries to give the plant time to get strong and healthy. Well I don't think we needed to do that because this plant was healthy and kept on growing. Before the summer was over it had grown to cover a 3 foot by 6 foot section of that flower bed and in the second year it filled it so that we now have no flowers in there. But we sure had lots of strawberries this year.

Once the strawberry plant started producing this year we are covering it with a mess to keep the birds out of it. They got the best of us at the end of the season last year but we didn't mind at that point as we had eaten more strawberries than ever before.

I don't mind sharing what we have with the birds if they didn't waste so much but they would stick their beaks right through the berry and then leave it at that, what a waste of a perfectly good strawberry. The mess netting will help keep that from happening and likely double our yeld.

This year we plant to run an extra garden for strawberries and rhubard but we will put a boder around it and raise it a bit so we can control runners that might take over the rest of the garden.

We also want to try a couple of new things, like strawberry planters and The Topsy Turvy. The planters both look great in their own way but one will hang and the other will be put in a spot that makes it shine. We have an old tree stump with bird houses on it. I may just use that stump to raise the planter above the ground.