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Growing Your Own Strawberries

© Susan Ward

In my last article, "It's a Berry Good Year in BC", I explained how to extend your strawberry season by growing everbearing berries, and ranted (a bit) about the bland taste of all those imported strawberries. Strawberries are grown commercially in every province throughout Canada (Quebec and Ontario are the biggest producers), but we still have to import berries. The solution to both these problems is to set aside a berry patch in your home garden. Absolutely nothing on earth tastes as good as a fresh picked, home grown strawberry!

Preparing the bed is the first step to growing your own strawberries. Choose a sunny site (as strawberries must have at least 6 hours of sun a day), where peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, or potatoes have never been grown. Create a bed of a size adequate to your needs; my 6 by 6 feet bed produces enough strawberries for a family of four. Your strawberry bed needs to be separate from the rest of your garden. Strawberries don't share space well and will run over anything else in the bed. (Not to mention that they shoot runners all over the place, including into your lawn, if they get a chance!) For this reason, I grow my strawberries in a raised bed separated from the rest of the garden by landscape ties.

Creating a raised bed is also helpful to ensure adequate drainage. Doubledig the soil down to at least 12 inches. Strawberries will grow in almost any garden soil (although they prefer a sandy loam), but the ground has to be nice and loose for good root production and to let the runners root. Then add lots of manure or compost and dig that in to enrich the soil.

I originally started my strawberry bed in August, but the best time to bed new strawberries is in early spring. If you don't have a kind friend to give you some, purchase strawberry plants at your local nursery. They're usually sold in bundles of a dozen or so crowns. Pay close attention to positioning your strawberries when you plant them; they have to be set just right with the soil just covering the tops of the roots, but not the crowns.

How you position them in the bed will depend on which planting scheme you've decided to use. The experts recommend planting strawberries in matted rows, spaced-rows, or hills, depending on which type of strawberries you're growing and the size of your bed. Strawberries and More has an excellent explanation of the three growing systems with diagrams. Remember when you're choosing a planting system that the higher the density, the fewer and smaller fruit you'll have.

The copyright of the article Growing Your Own Strawberries in Gardening in B.C. is owned by Susan Ward. Permission to republish Growing Your Own Strawberries in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.