Hello, I'm Jerry Goodspeed here at the Ogden Botanical Gardens and it's
mid-March and things are starting to happen and we're starting to plant and
it's just kind of an exciting time of the year.
It's also this time of the year that we start looking at strawberries and
planting some of the strawberries. And right now, if you go down to the
nurseries, you can get a lot of strawberries in what they call
bare-root bundles and they'll come as packs of 10, sometimes 4, and they'll be
actually bare-root strawberries. And they'll come with a little bit of a
root like this. Sometimes they'll have one or two leaves
sometimes there's hardly anything at all, normally that's okay, they're still alive
and they're good to plant. And this is the best time to be buying
them because they're relatively inexpensive and they're ready to grow and
ready to get going. So today we're just going to talk about
how to select them, how to plant them, and if they're bare-root, you're going to be
planting them in the early spring, before they really start to leaf out.
So, let's take a look at the plant itself, the strawberry plant, as you can see,
it's made up of a crown, this area right here, some leaves, and some roots.
It's this area that we're most concerned about when we do some planting
on our strawberries. If we plant that strawberry plant too
deep, you'll see in here that we'll run into some problems and cause some dieback.
If we plant it too shallow where it's sticking out of the ground like that, this
will dry out and die as well. So what we try to do, is to just keep it
right at soil level, right in the middle of that little what we call a crown or
that little seat that goes around the plant.
We've already worked some organic matter into this area and I think that's probably
the most important thing you're going to do before you plant your strawberries is
work some organic matter and we've also already worked a little bit of fertilizer
in there - an all purpose fertilizer. So now what we're going to do is we're
going to eventually start to plant this area with strawberries.
And we've picked a day-neutral strawberry this one will produce fruit on and off
throughout the season, never really a heavy crop, but just a light crop
throughout the season. So I've already worked the soil a little
bit right in here and we're just going to dig up an area and it's kind of like what
I said, we're going to try to put that soil level right mid-way through that
crown or through that seat. We're going to spread out the roots a
little bit as we dig our hole so that we get some good growth.
it's really pretty basic and pretty simple but we do get a lot of questions on it
and if anything I want it to be just a tad bit high.
I'd rather have a little bit too high than a little bit too low.
So here you can see we've planted our strawberry plant, you can see a little bit
of that crown coming up, most of it is in the ground, it's a little bit loose within
about one week you'll be surprised, that thing will just take right off and it will
root in there really nice.
Okay, we planted one of these already
bare-root and we talked a little bit about buying them bare-root in the spring
which is usually the cheapest way to get them or least expensive anyway.
But sometimes you go in there and they will have already potted them up for you.
And you'll go in and get containers like this.
And that's still good, sometimes it's a little more expensive, but the plant is
still fine, it's good and you can see it's already growing and in fact this one
already had some blooms on it. So we're just going to plant it next to
this one that we planted bare-root that we got, and of course we're going to have
to do it a little bit different because we got a little bit bigger hole we're going
to have to dig, obviously. And normally these plants, you can just
kind of pop right out of that container, they'll just slide right out, and you
like to see this which is some really good roots growing on the outside of that plant
not too root bound, if it's really root bound, you might want to consider ripping
some of those roots off of there. This one isn't bad at all, you know some
soil is falling off, sloughing off, that's okay.
And you can see in the nursery they planted it just like we talked about,
right at that crown level, so we're going to try to maintain that same level in the
soil with that strawberry. So we'll dig this hole, we always want the
hole bigger, or rather wider, as wide as we possibly can, 2 to 3 times as wide as
the plant is, that gives those roots a chance to grow out into the soil.
We'll break it up a little bit, I already told you that we threw some organic matter
in here which is always good. Smash it in a little bit, don't have to be
too friendly or kind with 'em, they're strawberries.
They can stand a little bit of abuse, in fact they kind of like it I think.
There it is, planted at that same level and you can see that we haven't gone too
deep and this one of course since it was already in the pot and already growing is
a lot bigger than our little one that we did the bare-root, but come back in
3 weeks, they'll both be about the same size growing really well.
Okay, now once you've got 'em planted, you're going to have to take care of them.
And one of the problems that we run into with strawberries is people over water
them - they're too kind to them. Let them dry out.
Just check, before you ever water them, what you want to do is actually dig down
into the soil a little bit, see if there's still some moisture there.
And if it's still kind of damp to the feel, usually they're okay.
When that starts to dry out, soak the area, those roots will be down anywhere
from 4 to 6 to 8 inches so make sure you get that water down 4 to 6 to 8 inches,
soak that area really good, and then let it dry out, don't be afraid to even let
them almost get to the point of wilt because that will force those roots to
grow out deep and be really nice and healthy, we like that, most strawberries
are killed because we over water them. We're too kind to them.
And this crown right here rots, that we already talked about a little bit, so
don't do that.