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David Handley: Hello. My name is David Handley. I'm with the University of Maine Cooperative
Extension. I am their vegetable and small fruits specialist. In the next few minutes
we are going to talk about planting a strawberry bed. Now, the first thing you need to think
about when you are going to plant a strawberry bed in your garden is to have your soil tested.
The soil pH should be around 6.2. Your soil test will tell you what needs to be done.
You can see a video on that on our website. Once the soil is tested and you've got the
fertilizer put in at the rates that the soil test recommends, then you are ready to plant.
Typically, in Maine, we are planting usually in May. But we can go as late as June. After
that it's hard to get good plant quality. The soil temperatures are so high that the
plants will be a little stressed. So really, as soon as you can work the soil
in the spring, that's the time to plant. The plants themselves are very tolerant of cold
soil temperatures. So you don't need to worry about that.
Now, when you buy your plants from a nursery, order them from a nursery or buy them from
a store, this is typically what you're going to get. These are called dormant crowns. These
are actually living strawberry plants. They consist of this area here, which is called
the crown, and then hopefully a nice healthy root system underneath it. The crown itself
is just a compressed stem. It has a terminal bud, which is going to produce leaves and
eventually some flowers and fruit for you and then a bunch of axillary buds, which go
down along the side. These produce little branches, which in some
cases are going to be runners. We are going to use those runners to fill out the plant
bed. Sometimes there will be branch crowns. So it would just be like a mini crown on the
side here. Those will produce more fruit for you. So we want some of those too.
But initially, what you should look for is some green tissue or white tissue on the top.
The crowns themselves should be firm, not mushy. They should have a nice creamy, yellow
look to the roots. They shouldn't be black and they shouldn't have mold on them. If they
do, there has been some problem in storage or in transport. You should take those back
and get some nice, healthy plants to start off with.
So as I say, these dormant crowns should be planted in the soil as the spring gets started
in May. Typically what we are going to use is a matted row production system. This is
a perennial system, where we plant the first year and use the daughter plants or runners
that come from these crowns to fill up the space between them to give us a nice full
bed for fruiting next year. So, to plant them, we just take a crown and
put them in the soil. Dig a nice hole with a trench in your pre‑prepared soil. Place
that in. You want to dig the hole deep enough so that you're not compressing the roots.
You don't want the roots to bend up like this. You want them to stay straight out.
Now, if there are some long, straggly roots that make that job difficult, you can always
take some scissors and just trim them. You don't want cut off too much. Don't cut off
more than 25% of the total length. But just trim them up so they are nice and even. Then
you can just put them in that whole. The depth that you want to plant them is such that the
soil comes to about halfway up that crown. So when we plant the strawberries, you want
the soil depth to be right about here. We don't want to bury the growing point, because
you will kill the plant. These aren't seeds. They are not bulbs. They are growing plants.
We don't want to bury them too shallow, because if the roots are exposed the plant will dry
out. So dig that hole deep enough to bring them to about halfway up the crown. Then just
firm the soil around them a little bit. You don't have to leave a big pit there, because
that will collect too much water. But firm the soil around those, so that when the rain
hits it, it won't wash it down and expose those roots.
Now, your spacing on planting in a matted row should be about 18 inches apart, as you
see here. What's going to happen is, as these plants produce runners, we will root those
runners between these mother plants and on either side of them to fill out that bed.
We can just go down the row. The trowel works pretty well. But we've also
come across a nice method of planting strawberries. This is just a piece of eight inch flat bar
that we put a little bend in. You can see we have carved a little nook on it. These
aren't sharp. But they are rounded. One of the ways to plant strawberries that
I think goes a lot faster ‑ I'll move to my next 18 inch spot here and trim this root
up ‑ is I just place my strawberry right where I want it and I just grab about a half‑inch
of the root here. I don't want to grab the plant up here. I just want to get enough so
that it will pull the plant down. Then I hold this straight up and down and
just apply pressure down into the soil and push down. This method is really quick. It
will move you along the soil really quickly. We can plant a lot of strawberries. If you
are only planting a few, a trowel works just fine. But if you've got a lot of strawberries
ahead, a little simple tool like this can really speed the process up for you.
Now, we have talked about how to plant in the row. Between your rows, you can see behind
me, I have already got a row planted here. You need about four feet, because we are going
to allow these rows to get out to about two feet wide on each side. We want to maintain
a nice aisle way to be able to walk through here and be able to pick the berries next
year on this side without standing in the bed on that side.
So, four feet between your rows. About 18 inches between your plants in the row. Once
you know your varieties, if you have a variety that you know is not going to produce very
many runners ‑ these would be varieties like All Star for example ‑ you can cheat
them in a little bit. Maybe plant them as close as a foot apart.
If you are growing varieties that you know produce an awful lot of runners, you can actually
save money by buying fewer plants and spacing them further apart. These would be varieties
such as Sparkle. You can learn more about varieties at the Cooperative Extension website.
Now, after we get our strawberry bed planted, we need to take care of them for the remainder
of that season. One important thing to note is that we are not going to pick a crop in
the first year. These are some strawberries that were planted about four weeks ago. The
ones that we just planted will be looking like this in about a month. You can see they've
grown. They will kick out a few leaves. But the other thing they will do is they will
start kicking out these flower clusters. Now, in the planting year, we want to remove
these flower clusters. It's very simple. You just follow the stalk back. Just pinch it
off between your thumb and forefinger. Throw it down there.
You want to do this when the flowers are still in the bud stage and are just starting to
open, because this stem tissue will be nice and tender and it pinches off really easily.
If you wait until there is big, red fruit hanging off here, this stem becomes very woody.
Then you're going to have to go through there with scissors or clippers. It's going to take
you a lot longer. But we just pinch that off. The reason we
do that is because we want to encourage this plant to develop daughter plants or runners.
You can see that right here in the plant next to it. These are already starting to kick
out their daughter plants. So we don't want fruit in the first year.
We want to tell the plant to concentrate on vegetative growth, because we are going to
use these runners to fill all the spaces between these plants and the top of the bed. We want
the final bed to be about 18 inches to two feet wide. We don't want to get any wider
than that. So if they start slipping off to the edge
here, we just hold them back in place. You can do that with just a clump of soil or use
a little rock. Some people like to use the old‑fashioned hairpins to hold them in place.
But this will force them to root. Then we will have a nice, solid bed. That will flower
next spring and give us our fruit in June. So pinch those flowers in the first year.
Get those runners going. We'll take a look a little later at some runner development
and how to pin those in place. [music]
Transcription by CastingWords�