Strawberries

Vertical strawberry planters in April.

We grew strawberries at two of our sites this summer at Sole Food. At Hastings, we have a half-acre site in the parking lot of the Astoria hotel. This is the original site and therefore has a really efficient use of space. When they could no longer go out – they went up! Our strawberries are planted in vertical PVC tubes. The tubes have 2 inch holes drilled into the sides about 12 inches apart in staggered rows. To install them, we stand up the tube and attach it to the side of the wooden raised beds. We then fill with soil from the top of the tube, tamping to make sure it’s good and full. We set up a drip irrigation line running along the top of each tube.  We also placed a pie plate below each tube so that there is some wicking action happening below. These vertical tubes run along side the perimeter of the farm and our main walkway – they go wherever they can fit!

At our pacific site the strawberries are planted in staggered rows, filling up one whole section with these two-year plants. Strawberries will continue to produce after two years, but their production will often slow way down which means most farmers replace them after two years. Keeping them together in one section just makes crop planning easier. This section also got drip irrigation.

Planting:

To plant the strawberries we trimmed the end of the roots so that they were about 4 inches long. We then dipped the plant into a kelp solution full of micronutrients that will give the plant a jump-start. You want to dig a hole deep enough to accommodate the roots – you want the roots straight and not forced to turn upwards at the end with the crown of the plant flush with the soil level. With most plantings, ensure that you aren’t relying on mounding up the dirt around the plant to ensure it’s covered. That dirt will simply wash away and leave the plant bare.  

Runners:

The runners of the strawberry plant are the plant’s way of reproducing. The runner, or stolon, is a long, leafless branch that grows horizontally out of the plant in search of new space, soil, water and light. If left alone, the runner will develop a node that will root itself and form a new strawberry plant. Lissa told me the runner acts like a placenta – feeding the new plant until it is able to live fully on its own. At that point the runner will die off and the plants will no longer be connected. So- if you want new plants in your strawberry patch, let your runners go!

Staple marking a runner we want to keep.

Runners do function like suckers though- when they are putting energy into their reproductive efforts they are not putting that energy into their fruit production. So if your goal is to harvest lots of good strawberries, you want to remove those runners to refocus that energy. I would pull off the runners by hand. Some folks on the farm preferred to use a harvest knife – sometimes this helps if the runners get really big. We would go through and pull off the runners at least once a week. When we were harvesting, we would also bring a small tote/bucket for compost and pull out any bad fruit or runners while harvesting and then the job is always being done.

There were some plants that didn’t take at the start of the season (or were pulled out by the crows…) and so we had some empty spots in our rows. To fill in these spots, we would use a soil staple to mark out a runner that we wanted to leave so that it wouldn’t get picked off by a farmer and the runner would then become a new plant in that empty hole.

Harvesting:

You want to pick your strawberries when they are fully all the way around deep red – no white tips or almost red spots. We could always notice a difference in flavour between almost red and red. Make sure that you keep some of the stem and all of the hull still on the fruit (also known as the peduncle and calyx – such good names!) They look better and keep better that way. I used my fingers to pinch off the stem and harvest, some choose to use a knife. We would not sell anything that had any soft spots or rain damage, but would harvest those to save for staff to eat.

With the strawberries in rows we would just harvest right into the flats. For the strawberries in the vertical tubes we would use a fashionable yogurt tub necklace so that you could reach up above you and harvest with both hands without having to hold on to a flat. We never washed strawberries as they keep much longer that way.

Strawberries are amazing to have at markets! We would always offer samples – a sure fire way to get folks coming back for more.