One of my favorite fruits of all time also happens to be one of the easiest ones
to grow. And that would be the ubiquitous strawberry.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening,
where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. Now before this date,
before right now,
I've only grown strawberries in containers in very simple urban environments.
But as you can see behind me, I've got this bed prepped.
We're ready to plant some strawberries.
In today's video we're going to do it from bare root,
which is one of the most cost-effective ways to do it.
So we're going through the planting and the initial setup phase in this Part One
video for strawberries. So without further ado,
cultivate that Like button and I will personally bestow upon you the power to
grow the most juicy and Epic strawberries of all time.
And let's get into the video.
Before we even get into planting them in the ground we want to talk types,
and there's sort of two categories of types for your strawberries.
The first would be,
are you going to grow them from strawberry starts like these that you see right
here?
Or are you going to grow them from this weird Frankenstein's monster looking bag
of what we call a bare root strawberry? So, why would I do bare roots?
Well simply put, it is much, much cheaper.
This is about 25 to 28 bare root strawberries.
Cost me the same as these two singular strawberry plants right here.
Somewhere around $15 here and these were maybe like five or $6.
So I've got two plants here. I've got 28 plants here.
Obviously it's a lot more cost-effective to grow them this way.
At the same time,
it's faster to grow them this way because these were bare root strawberries that
have now been rooted up. So that's your first decision point.
I'm personally going to say if you grow a lot of strawberries,
then go with bare root.
If you're going to grow just a few in a container and you don't want to deal
with what we're about to do with these bare root strawberries,
then just go with these ones right here.
Your second decision point is going to be actually what type of strawberry do
you grow? And you have three categories. Two of them are the most common.
You've got your June bearing strawberries which as the name implies,
they have a very tight fruiting window in June with nice big juicy
strawberries. And then you also have your everbearing strawberries,
which don't really live up to the name because they don't bear straight up
throughout the year,
but you'll get maybe two or three sets worth in good climates.
And that's what I've decided to go with is an everbearing strawberry.
Because in my climate here in 10b,
I'm going to get a lot more mileage out of them even if they're not the juiciest
and the plumpest strawberries. Now there are day neutral strawberries,
as well as alpine or sort of wild strawberries,
these white and very small ones that you can also look into.
But I think if you're just starting out growing strawberries,
stick with deciding between your June bearing and your everbearing and your
potted up and your bare root.
Before we get into how to prepare this bare root for planting,
see they look kind of weird don't they? It looks sort of like a weird alien.
I want to get into some of the anatomy. Of course,
these are the bare roots down here, down below,
and they join up right here, the base where the soil line would be.
So you're going to want to match the soil line there.
You don't want really any of this part, aside from the very tops of the roots,
to be below the soil. You don't want to bury the crown so to speak.
That's exactly what this part is.
And then of course we have new leaves and new stems emanating out and they're
actually starting to grow already.
So the real key with the bare root strawberry is not burying it anywhere
above this point. You don't want this in the soil,
keep it around here or below.
Now that we know what NOT to do when we're dealing with a bare root strawberry,
don't bury the crown,
we are going to hydrate these for maybe 30 minutes to an hour in water.
Remember these have made a long journey. These roots,
they're going to do a lot better when we transplant them into the bed,
IF we hydrate them. So I've got my two bare root varieties,
which I realize I haven't even told you yet.
I've got Albion and I have seascape,
both supposed to be great producers here in zone 10b. And if you're wondering,
hey Kevin, which ones should I choose for my area?
I highly recommend doing a Google search for your specific zone because there
are a lot of different varieties of strawberries. And again,
these are perennial plants. You're going to get them year after year.
So make sure you select the right variety.
But I'm going to see you guys in about 30 minutes to an hour to come check on
these. But while we're doing that,
let's go out in the front and we'll talk about the soil and the sun
requirements. We're back out here in the front yard to talk sun,
soil requirements for our strawberries.
So this area I've selected here is kind of my container odd fruit zone.
So the dragonfruit are behind me.
There are some blueberries in containers behind me. And in this raised bed here,
it's going to be the strawbs.
So I'm putting strawbs in and why did I select this location? Number one,
strawberries love sun. They want eight plus hours of sun per day.
That's what this area is going to provide them.
I was actually going to put it behind there,
but the sun comes in a little bit later because it's blocked by the house.
So you really do have to watch your area.
Make sure you're not making a permanent mistake by just placing this in the
wrong spot. Now, soil.
I filled this up with a relatively standard raised bed mix,
but the secret ingredient that I'm adding is Berry-tone.
I put actually an entire bag of Berry-tone from Espoma Organic,
who are the sponsors of this video, in.
The reason why is because it's not like blueberries where they need like a 4.5
to 5 pH, but strawberries do prefer a slightly acidic soil,
a little more acidic than your average vegetable crop.
So we're talking somewhere in that 5.8 to 6.4 range.
Most soil is a little higher than that, at least in my annual vegetable garden.
And so the Berry-tone helps to lower it and also gives it a lot of the nutrients
that it needs.
So I just applied about a bag here and I filled it up a little bit shy of
the top because I want to have some room to apply some mulch. So really,
as far as strawberries go, good soil, make sure you modify it slightly,
get it a little more acidic and you're good to go.
So let's go ahead and check back in on our bare roots.
So it has been about 40 minutes or so.
We are soaked up and now it's time to get to the planting.
And this really is the critical point.
So you want to make sure that you isolate each bare root. Again,
there's about 24 in each of these buckets here.
And when you're digging your hole you want to go at least as deep as the height
or the depth, so to speak, of the root.
So that's going to be about six inches there.
And I'm going to dig a hole roughly about the same length wide on
each side. And so that would mean if I'm putting it in this area right here,
it'll be a hole that I would say is about a diameter of about a foot or so.
And then about six inches deep.
So if I want to put my bare root strawberry right here,
we're going to bring it in about six inches from the corner.
We'll start from the corner. We'll dig down roughly the depth of the root,
just like I've said,
and what you want to do is - you don't want to like lay it like this and kind of
do that. You can just kind of fan the roots out a little bit.
You can create a little mound in the middle if you want,
makes it a little bit easier. And again, the key is the placement of the crown.
So I've fanned the roots out just slightly here,
put that guy in and then you want to bury it,
make sure you keep it at that soil height. That's really the key here.
So it'll take a little bit of adjustment sometimes,
but I'm going to show you a close-up version of planting one in.
So here we have another one. We're going to plant it roughly 18 inches apart.
You can get it a little tighter than that.
Eighteen is going to give them the best ability on a per plant basis to really
put out a ton of leaves and a ton of fruit.
If you go a little tighter it's just going to be a little bit less production
but a lot easier to manage, I would say.
So I'm squeezing just a little more than the average in here at around maybe 14
inch spacing. But again,
what we're going to do is we're going to fan those leaves out, of those roots,
gonna hold it. Now look very closely.
We've got the tops of the roots connecting to this point right here,
this crown point right here. So let's go ahead and very gently backfill around
making sure that those roots get some nice coverage and you'll see exactly the
point that we leave our strawberry plant at.
So make sure that they're you know, they're nice and compact.
Don't pound it down, but good compaction there. So take a look.
If I pull it up just slightly, I'm seeing the very tops of the roots right here.
And actually even a little bit of the tops of the roots is okay.
You'd rather have that than have it a little bit below.
So we'll snug it in. And that's exactly how you want to plant it. Well,
they're planted out and I have to say, they don't look amazing right now.
It's a bare root strawberry guys.
It's going to take some time to really come in.
But one thing that I did do is after I planted in, I applied some mulch.
About two inches of mulch.
I used a shredded straw called GardenStraw but you can use, more or less,
whatever mulch source you have available - fallen leaves, grass clippings,
micro bark - all of that kind of stuff will be perfectly fine.
You want to just make sure that you control that soil temperature,
remember we just transplanted in, there's going to be some transplant shock,
as well as the soil moisture and just mulch in general.
We know it's a good thing to add to the top of soil.
So if you want to see how the strawberries are going to go over the course of
the season, make sure to subscribe for Part Two.
But for now we've learned how to plant them in.
We've learned some differences between the potted up and the bare roots.
And until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.