Planting Strawberries in Containers for Beginners! 🍓🤤// Garden Answer

hey guys how's it going today i want to talk about growing strawberries and containers i've got some beautiful strawberries here i've got some that bloom red and some that bloom pink which i think are going to be both pretty and i'm excited for the fact that they're going to grow some food and i think that's where a lot of us are at right now and i have to say i'm always excited when more people are showing interest in growing more food and increasing sustainability i know we're always trying to work on that every year so i want to kind of gear this video toward those of you who are beginners who have never grown strawberries before i'm just going to run through kind of the basics and growing strawberries in containers i think this is my opinion i think it's easier to grow them in containers than it is to grow them in the ground because strawberries send out runners and if you've got them in the ground and you're not on top of it all the time they can quickly become a little bit invasive which may not be a bad thing you may not mind that they're going all over the place but i like to keep things a little bit more contained so containers is a really good option i'm planting the mine in this metal tub which i do get asked often whether or not the metal creates a little bit more heat and burns the roots but i've never had a problem with that i think it's maybe to do with the amount of moisture they get we consistently water our plants throughout the summer usually about once a day when they're in containers but you can grow them in raised beds of any style any kind of container these are really good for hanging baskets as well so the first thing i'm going to do i've already drilled four holes in the bottom of this container i did that at an earlier date you can see clearly i have already planted in this container so i want to make sure to run my drip tubing because we do try to hook all of our containers up on drip if we can because that eliminates a little bit of extra work for us so i'm just going to run this tube through one of the drain holes out the bottom and then i'm just going to cut it off so i've got a generous amount here to work with once we're done planting the next thing i'm going to do of course is add my soil now you don't want to go out and dig soil out of your garden it just does not react the same way in containers it compacts and gets really hard and strawberries like really good drainage a little bit more of a lofty soil mix so i'm using the bagged organic potting mix that's the other thing about growing in containers and raised beds is that you can completely control what your plants are growing in and what they're taking up into their systems because we in the end eat that so i'm going to fill up this container real quick so these are one cubic foot bags i think this is going to take about two and a half bags altogether i've got my soil all leveled out and this is perfect you want to make sure you're left with about an inch or two lip both for ease of watering because you don't want your soil subbing up and going over the sides of the container making a mess but we're also going to be using straw today as a top dress over the soil so we want plenty of room for that next thing i'm going to do is add in my fertilizer and you do want to make sure you've got your fertilizing schedule figured out and you can do it one of two ways so i like to do the low maintenance approach which is adding a slow release fertilizer into the soil twice a year so i'm going to add it in today and then i'll add it in again later in the season or you can do the liquid approach i know some people really like to do that in that case i would use the liquid grow and you do that on about in every two week schedule and usually that you can add that into like your annual fertilizing schedule for your annual flowers and it's easy to do but i tend to like to just do something that i can just kind of forget about a little bit i don't want all of my containers to be big maintenance so i'm just going to follow the instructions on the back of the bag and it says for potted plants when preparing soil for new plants mix two cups of berry tone per cubic foot of soil so i use two and a half cubic feet of soil so i need to add in a little over two cups of this and then i'm just going to mix it in as best as i can with my hands this is not a hot fertilizer it's a slow release so even if i go a little bit under or a little bit over it's not going to hurt our plants which is another reason why i like to use it it's about one cup two cups how much does it say two cups per berry i have to use a little over four cups did i get my math wrong i use two and a half cupid feet two cups per cubic foot so i have to use like five cups five cups [Applause] that looks perfect so let me mix it in one could add half the soil and then fertilizer and mix that part up and then add the top half and mix that up that would be a little easier you know you've mixed it well enough when you start to sweat okay so now let me talk to you about these plants these are both ever-bearing type strawberries so we've got buried treasure red right here that has the red blooms you can see there are a couple of berries starting to form on this one and then we have buried treasure pink when i start with potted berries like this they usually bear the first year and they do great some people will tell you to pop the blooms off the first year so that they have a chance to establish a really good root system i don't find that you need to do that typically with potted types when you're getting bare root starts like little tiny bare root strawberries it's probably a good idea to do that until they've got gained a little bit of size that way they're not sending a ton of energy into producing fruit but these we're going to let fruit this year the differences between strawberries so i just said these are ever bearing which means that they typically have two harvests usually one in june and then one later on in the season there are june bearing type of strawberries which bear all at one time in june which if you want to preserve food can or freeze or anything like that then you're guaranteed a bigger crop all at one time and they're typically a little bit bigger berries while ever bearing have a little bit smaller berries but they're usually a little bit sweeter so you kind of pros and cons there it's kind of a good idea to have both types growing that way you have a lot to preserve then you have some you can eat on through the year and then there are varieties called day neutral which are not affected by how much light they get during the day they'll just keep bearing strawberries throughout the season but just a few at a time usually i've only dealt with the spring crop like the june crop and ever bearing type and these are ever bearing so in terms of spacing you can get away with putting strawberries together a little bit closer when you're doing them in containers like these space out between 8 and 10 inches typical strawberries you want to go like 16 inches if you're planting them in the ground so these we can kind of fudge that rule a little bit so i am planting six in this container i think this is a 24 inch pot but strawberries are very shallow rooted so they don't need an enormous container in fact this is a perfect shape it's whiter than it is deep so this is great for strawberries so i'm just going to get all of these planted and when you do that let me show you like these it's easy to see because i'm just going to pot it right up to where current like the current soil level is but a strawberry will have a crown and that's right the level where the roots start to come down you'll see kind of like where the stems start to come up that's the crown of the plant and you want that sitting right above the soil level you don't want it underneath so when you get potted ones it kind of takes away that question but you want to firm them in really really well like that so let me do that with the remaining five and then we'll set up our drip system oh that's perfect so these are nicely firmed in and we're ready to set up our drip system but i did want to address the fact that i planted these very close to the edge they'll be completely fine planted like this in fact they'll start to cascade over the edge a little bit and the berries will benefit from being able to dangle rather than rest inside the straw will help with this as well you don't want to necessarily let your plants though set off runners the first year because they take a tremendous amount of energy away from the mother plant so it's a good idea to cut those off uh this year when you plant them usually they recommend like two years for the baby plants like the baby bare root plants that you plant they say cut off the runners on those for the first two years and then that third year you can start taking some of those babies off to propagate them and create new plants i don't typically do that with mine i usually keep mine all in containers and i let them kind of drape over the edge but you want to make sure that when those runners go down the side if they ever touch the ground they will take off i had it happen to me last year in fact i still have a tub exactly this same size and style in our cold frame planted up with strawberries and now i have some in my flowerbeds right behind where those strawberries were because i didn't see that back behind they had trailed over and so now i have baby strawberries in that flower bed so now i'm going to set up my drip system you can do this a couple of different ways you could couple off of this and then use a drip tube and just curl it around which i might go see if i've got a little piece of in the the barn i think that would be easier or you could split and do maybe three emitters with half gallon per hour emitters in this container let me go look for a piece of drip tube i found a piece had a little bit of extra leftover from our vegetable garden little project we did this spring this has emitter holes every six inches that emit half gallon per hour of water so what i'm going to do is cut this black tube and then use a straight coupler to connect these two together so cut that this is what a straight coupler looks like right here just attaches the two of them can be hard on your fingers and oh look at that it's like it was made for this pot we're lucky okay and then i'm going to use these are called goof plugs right here put that on the end and then i brought out a few landscape staples just to make sure that it stays tacked down drip irrigation for strawberries i think is the best way to go especially if you live in a humid wet environment because strawberry plants can suffer from powdery mildew it's not good for the berries to have like excessive moisture around them it can cause them to rot and most plants prefer watering at the root zone not overhead so to have it set up like this i think our plants will be a lot happier in the end so we are going to then put our top dress this will help for when these plants produce berries the berries can rest right on top of this straw rather than right on top of wet soil and that will help the strawberries stay nice and not rot and it also creates a barrier for insects between you know the in soil level and the berry level so let me finish with this real quick it looks pretty too i think until our windstorm comes through tomorrow slugs aren't going to go across this straw and you can buy straw sometimes at your local garden center my parents have it at their garden center typically or you can get it at like a local feed store we have a tractor supply or dmb that's those are our local stores where you can get straw like this i usually have one bale at least sitting in our barn for projects like this okay that's all done so the other thing that's really nice about growing strawberries and containers like this is that they're mobile so if you have a hard time finding a position in your yard that's sunny enough for strawberries because they are full sun they prefer six to eight plus hours of sunshine if you have them in a container you can go set it right where they get the amount of sun that they need if you were to set something like this on a solid surface and you have a drip tube running out the bottom you would want to make sure to pop it up on some risers it's not a bad idea to do either way to create a little bit of distance between the pot and the ground so that drainage is not a problem this is going in our vegetable garden on top of gravel so i'll be able to kind of scoot the gravel away so that there's enough room for this drip tube so nothing gets crimped or kinked or anything like that in terms of watering they like to have a consistently moist soil but not ever soggy and they like a very well draining mix so you want to keep that in mind that's why i always go for just a good potting mix that's already kind of mixed up to be really good for stuff like this and then full sun and then their fertilization so i know the fertilizer is already in the soil i will have to follow it up let me let me see yeah early spring and late spring so it says to feed 45 to 60 days after the early spring application which we're kind of getting into mid-spring i might do a light feed but i put in plenty that i feel like i could get away with not doing maybe doing a little bit of liquid toward the end of the season to get them through to the end and the next year doing my two full feedings but and it's different dosages too so when you go in with your second feeding it's quite a lot less than i just mixed in to my initial feeding when i mixed it in with the soil hope that made sense so that's it for this video those are the basics to planting strawberries and containers it's incredibly easy crop to plant and a really great one especially if you can get potted strawberries to get fruit right away and even better if you can find ones that have pretty blooms like the buried treasure red which is available now the berry treasure pink will be out in garden centers next year so keep your eyes out for that one thank you guys so much for watching this video and we will see you in the next one bye [Music]

Channel: Garden Answer

Views: 1,891,714

Keywords: Garden, Answer, Laura, Flower, gardening, gardener, beautiful, succulents, diy, grow, green, Proven, Winners, Fall, Winter, summer, spring, plant, planting, growing, plants, succulent, shrubs, shrub, bush, soil, dirt, earth

Id: PQJL9h9R0Cc

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020