Grow Strawberries in Vertical Containers 🍓(FULL GROW GUIDE)

when someone asks me hey Kev what fruit should I grow if I'm a first-time Gardener I always answer the same thing strawberries that's because unlike most fruits you don't have to have an orchard to do it you can grow them in a really small space I don't know anyone who doesn't like them and they are relatively easy to grow if you know what you're doing so in this video we're going to show you how to grow them in a vertical Tower from start to finish when we're talking growing strawberries you could of course try to grow strawberries from seed I've seen it done before I haven't done it myself most people grow from this weird little alien looking thing right here which is called a be root strawberry but not all be root strawberries are created equal in fact there are three different major types of strawberries that you can select when you are purchasing a be root and the one you choose really impacts how it grows over the season the first type is going to be June bearing it's the most common and you'll see this at the grocery store all of the time but the name is very self-explanatory it produces most of its strawberries in that June window the flowers will start to form in Spring as long as temps are above about 50° those flowers form they open they start developing into fruit and you get it all in June so if you want a flush of strawberries at one time that would be the choice for you next up you have everbearing and it's not a perfectly accurate name in this case you'll get some spring harvests you'll get some Midsummer Harvest you might get some late summer and fall harvests so it's certainly more spread out over the season everbearing but these harvests tend to be a bit smaller in overall yield so you're not going to get as big of strawberries and you may not get as many overall by weight but it's very consistent over the course of a season and they tend to produce no matter what as long as the temperature is not too cold or too hot so anywhere between about 45 to 85° fhe and they will continually produce strawberries final type is called a day neutral strawberry this is a Seascape variety one of my absolute favorites and it's called this because it doesn't really matter what time of year so spring summer fall and it doesn't really matter too much what temperature it's going to reliably produce strawberries so it's an even more flexible version of the everbearing type this is my selection again called Seascape a wonderful variety let's figure out how to plant this weird looking alien so to plant these well we're going to use a vertical system this is a green stock Garden I have a fully built one over here the reason they're so good for strawberries is because strawberries want to spread out they'll do something called throwing out Runners which is a stem that will come out hit the ground and create another version of what you see here and so by planting in something like a green stock it won't really have the ability to do that it's going to just throw a runner out into the air and has nowhere to root so that helps control some of that issue that you see with strawberries but also everything loves to eat a strawberry I like to eat them bugs like to eat them birds like to eat them and so by having this overhang here and having the strawberry sort of hang in the air there's a lot less issue for them to get hit by your pill bugs or your ear wigs or any other sort of pest I can also rotate this and get a lot of different access to Sun cuz strawberry is a plant that really wants Sun access I can water this easily and really most importantly I can grow about 42 strawberry plants which will produce far more than 42 strawberries a bunch of strawberries per plant in about a footprint of 2 square ft by 4T tall let's plant our be root strawberries this is for sure the most finicky part of the process there's some things you can really do wrong here which will cause this to die back and you will have spent some money on basically a weird looking weed type of thing that doesn't produce any juicy fruits so soil what I'm using here in this particular case is actually Fox Farm Strawberry Fields not sponsored anything it's just the highest quality organic potting mix in my particular area that I could grab but it's kind of funny that it has the same name so I'm just going to fill this up you want some sort of fertility in this mix cuz I'm not even going to add any fertilizer I'm just going to fill this up fill the green stock here so we're filled up but the part you can go wrong it's understanding the be root strawberry becoming one with it merging your own Consciousness with the strawberry so let's take a really closeup look what do you see here well all the stuff down here that is the root those are the roots and then what you see where the roots meet this part right here this is called the crown the crown must never be fully buried you know this is where the crown begins right here it kind of ends right there and you know it ends there because you're starting to see new growth this green section here coming out you don't want to plant more than about halfway up the crown never violate that rule you can get something called Crown rod strawberries are gone you're sad again right so what you want to do is bring it straight down you don't even need to really fan it out too much if you don't want to you can just kind of pop it straight down and in this case I'm just going to move some of this soil aside now watch very closely I'm not getting too precious here I'm just going straight down in I'm thinking since I want this to overhang I'm actually thinking maybe I'll bias this a little bit closer towards this part of the pocket and then in I go now this is where you can really mess up a strawberry planting and I've done it before myself so avoid this first of all check did I bury the crown no it's about halfway halfway up I would say so that's that's looking pretty good but the soil is not really hugging those roots the soil is kind of loosely around the roots right now not a really good situation for this newly transplanted strawberry remember it's a bare root it doesn't really want to be this way we made it be this way because we grew it this way and then we pulled it out of the soil and shipped it over to me or to you so this plant wants to have soil all around it so what you need to do is make sure that you do that so here we go I'm just going to go ahead and compress normally You' do this part when you planted them all out but I'll just show you just come in nice healthy water and I personally am paranoid so I'll double check it did I bury the crown no I'm in a good spot here so I've hugged that soil around that's probably one of the biggest tips to preventing a bear root from just dying off once you transplant it so let me get the rest of these in and I'll show you what to do after they're planted we are planted up my friends and I will just really quickly explain how this particular system works of course you could DIY a system like this even with PVC pipe and some soil but this one's nice I mean it's it's really handy so what you do is you basically put a tear on you put this little water diverter on so as the water falls down the middle of the column in the future it'll just spread out nice and evenly and then you just offset by one and stack it on like that so let's get this up so the last piece to go on is just the top and this is where you would fill it up to water the whole system at once there was ever one con to a vertical Gardening System whether you're growing strawberries or not it's that it's in the air so the Sun hits just one side of it right and as the sun moves it'll hit some of it but like this side over here is going to rarely get sun which is why you can spin it so after planting there are some things you need to do one thing i' do in general is probably give it like a half turn every couple days just to make sure all the strawberries are getting light but let's talk about care before these things start to put out those juicy straws if you're growing every bearing strawberries in a system like this what you want to do is remove all the flowers that will start to emerge so we going to get some green growth coming out I'll see some flowers some really young ones clip those off for the first four to 6 weeks why because you don't want the plant trying to develop like one measly little strawberry you really want it putting out a lot of nice green growth and then you can let it rip after about 6 to 8 weeks or so if you are growing June bearing well there's two schools of thought one would be just let it go see what happens see what you get in that first year the other which is more extreme would be to actually remove all the flowers in the first year let it set up for the next year that's why I really like growing these day neutrals or these every Brin cuz I don't have to to go through the suffering and the pain and the emotional turmoil of waiting a whole year to get my strawberries the other thing you'll want to do remember I said strawberries produce Runners well in this case the runners are going to run off the system so they're very easy to clip and you'll be able to tell it's a runner cuz there'll be a stem coming out kind of going down like this and then there'll be another little Crown looking thing developing and then you can just clip that off why because it has nowhere to attach so it's just wasted energy for the plant so we'll check in once these size up and show you what's going on but before we check in I still have some be root strawberries left so I'll show you what I do with these to make sure that I'm covered in the system so my cluster of extra be roids I have like five or six of them so what I like to do is give myself a little insurance so I will not be as precious about how I plant but I'll just bring it in and throw it in a pot like this and this is basically my insurance this is my holding Zone these are going to root up they'll be a little tangled up but that's fine you can just separate them later on the other thing that's nice about this is when these ones shoot out runners in New Growth you can actually propagate strawberries fairly simp L and create your own bear roots for next season so you can keep growing these beautiful seascapes or whatever variety you decide so this is kind of what I do and I'll just fill a little touch more soil so if one of those dies out front it's no big deal because I can just steal from this little pot so I'll finish this up and we'll see how the strawberries are doing in a few weeks it's been a few weeks since we transplanted into our vertical Tower and I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised by how many of the strawberries took in fact I only see two down low that didn't didn't take so well so I'll replace those in a moment but let me show you what to do at this stage of growth you can see we've got a decent amount of leafy growth coming out of almost all of these strawberry starts and we're even starting to see some early flowers sometimes they're not open sometimes those white petals with that yellow Center are open I'm going to remove all of those at this stage it's early April right now good time to do it whether it's ever bearing or June bearing varieties so come in with some Snips and let's locate one of these right here I see this one right here and so you can tell this is going to be a flower cuz you can actually see the little bit of white petal inside of course you can also wait until that opens up you want to come down all the way to the base of that and just clip that off and same with this right there and there's also some dead material you might want to remove so let me see if I can find one here this is a good example so right here all of this material here this is all just dead may have been from the transplant but I personally think it's a good idea to clean this up it makes it look a lot better but also then the plant just doesn't have to support something that is no longer really serving it whatsoever also helps keep it nice and tidy so I don't see a runner right now I'm just going to keep on pruning these flowers off but what you would do is you'd trace it back to where it emanates from the crown of the strawberry and you'd give it a nice snip and that's really all you have to do at this phase so once I replace those strawberries that died with the ones that I potted up and put in the greenhouse a little bit ago always why you should have backups we're just going to check in once once we've got a lot more leafy growth don't really need to fertilize much just keep watering and you're good to go it has been a few weeks and not only is there more green growth but there are a ton of baby strawberries and there's even a few ripe strawberries so at this point it's time to start enjoying the literal fruits of your labor so take a look at this one down here it's starting to get red and what I do cuz sometimes it'll look red and it's actually not ripe yet is I give it a bit of a squeeze and if it's just a bit soft to the touch then I come through and harvest and when I harvest I get a little bit particular about it I harvest the stem all the way down to where it comes off of the plant and then I just trim that off to eat and it's just so good I like them a little bit tart and that sweetness comes in at the end so enjoy your strawberries but there are some things you have to know to care for them throughout the fruiting season so you'll notice this coming out this is a strawberry Runner what it wants to do cuz it doesn't think it's growing in a vertical system it thinks it's growing on the ground it wants to do this and then Roots will come out right here and then strawberries will start coming out right here and then it'll keep repeating this process I don't want to do that think about how much energy it is wasted trying to do this it could be spending that giving me these juicy strawberries so I cut this all the way down to the base now you have the opportunity if you want to to cut right there right before that Runner spot and root this in water and you can actually kind of prep some strawberries for next season or a different part of your garden but remove the runners keep this well watered you don't have to do too much fertilizing at this point in time it's if you're growing them in a greenstock or a portable vertical system you can just move them to a protected area cuz they will die in the frost you'd have to reset your strawberries or if you're in a warm climate just leave them where they are and that's strawberries in a vertical system if you like the green stock we just stocked some pretty cool new exclusive colors on our store it's my favorite current method for growing strawberries because I can just Harvest them at ease just like this and with that said guys good luck in the garden and keep on growing

Channel: Epic Gardening

Views: 64,667

Keywords: epic gardening, strawberries, grow strawberries, plant strawberries, growing strawberries, how to grow strawberries in containers, growing strawberries in pots, strawberry plant care

Id: Al53ao-JUPg

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024