Each flower will soon be a sweet juicy strawberry.
When you visit the nursery or garden center in the Spring you will probably see potted strawberry plants for sale – some already with berries starting to form. The thing is, Spring is too late to grow any strawberries. However, it’s the perfect time to grow strawberry plants – then you can get lots of fresh sweet strawberries out of your garden next spring.
Go ahead and buy a few of those plants this spring, and set them out 16″-24″ apart in a more or less permanent location in your garden. If you can bring yourself to do it pluck off those berries as soon as possible – they won’t amount to much anyway – let the plants concentrate on growing. Keep them weeded and watered, and fertilized this summer, and by fall you will have lots and lots of these…
One strawberry Mother will spread by runners to form many daughter plants. If not thinned in the fall, very few strawberries will form, but each of those daughter plants can be transplanted in September or October and will bear fruit the following spring.
In September, transplant those into your “real” strawberry patch. You could easily get a dozen daughter plants from each of the originals that you purchased this spring. Next spring you will be rewarded for your efforts.
I love strawberries and after reading this blog I loved it even more! It is delicious, yummy and very nutritious! And the best thing about it is that kids love its taste. Strawberries can be a healthy snack that children would surely enjoy.
It’s especially good if you don’t use chemicals, and the kids can pick them their selves and pop them right into the mouth. They love that, and it’s a great way to get kids interested in the garden. Plus they will remember it forever.
You should try it and see.
what if the strawberries bloom 2-3 times a harvest. could i just pluck them off the first harvest
is there any way to plump up the strawberries?
Not that I know of.
sorry i didnt mean winter… i meant when they first start to grow berries
just hang in there, but i have a question, if u just want to plant strawberries this one spring and you buy a plant with berries already developing from lowes or somewhere else, would you have to take off the berries… people told me they would be small, is there any way to get them to plump up their first winter?
Please Help!
A strawberry lover
You don’t have to remove the berries that come on such plants but at best they might work out to be garnish on your Wheaties. Individual strawberry plants don’t produce lots of berries – to make a very usable sized crop you need dozens (at least) of plants. Fortunately they are very easy to propagate.
Oh I would love to….problem is we now have 2 feet of snow on the ground.
I failed to mention that I did put a generous layer of dirt into the trash bags before I cinched them up.
NOW what do you think? : )
Dave,
We have an abandoned house behind us which I knew the previous owner had sweet little strawberries in a corner patch of the overgrown yard. the house is going to auction soon and I wanted to save a few plants from inevitable landscaping and have some strawberries for my family.
The problem is…its February in Washington. I was lucky to do this on a mild winter day before a major snow, but I wonder if it was worth the effort.
The plants were green with a lot died back. It had been left unattended for 3 years or so. I took several milk crates worth by digging them up by the root clod and putting them in a plastic garbage bag and placing them into a cardboard lined milk crate. I stacked the crates and then wrapped them with moving blankets.
In your humble opinion, will any survive such a late transplant? Or will I open bags of mush in spring?
thanks in advance
Don’t wait – go ahead and plant them out as soon as you can. If you can’t get them in the garden yet then pot them up and put mulch around the pots (outside) to buffer the soil temperature – until you can plant them permanently. Chances are you’ll have a good success rate.
Good information on the strawberries! I’m hoping that our strawberry efforts will bear fruit this year!
If they don’t – just stick with the program. It’s a long term commitment.