Strawberry Beds

Although I've moved the main soft fruit garden into a new place, the area left behind is a great place for growing with full sun. 

So down there I've divided it up into 11 new beds plus a bed for the rhubarb and some herbs (sweet cicely). One thing I was keen to get into the new beds was some strawberries.

Looking At hydroponics

This is a collaborative post.

So following on from my post about conserving water I’ve also been thinking lots about different growing methods and if I’d like to try any others, particularly if they’d be better in a hot summer.

From searches about straw bale gardening, to no dig, to minimum tillage, one that keeps popping up again and again is growing hydroponically.

Straight away I can see one major downside to this, the initial cost of set up. Having a good hydroponic system set up isn’t going to be cheap but once its set up all you have to provide are the hydroponic nutrients, water and a medium for them to grow in and keep the system working.

I remain sceptical about it all but I did speak to a strawberry farmer, who is a friend of my fathers, the other day and he said to me “No one growing strawberries commercially does it in soil anymore, that’s a thing of the past.”

Vertical Strawberry Planter

I'm rubbish at growing strawberries. 

I can grow most things but strawberries somehow never work for me. 

Now I can keep the plants alive and healthy but somehow I always end up feeding something else, either mice, birds or slugs. I've tried netting them, and growing them in different ways, I've had some success with white alpine strawberries but I always thought I could do a lot better.

So on Thursday my mum came over to help look after the children while I got on with some jobs. The boy, however, wasn't playing ball and was being quite a daddies boy, no chance of working on the extension so I decided to tackle a little project I'd been thinking of for ages. I took the boy with me and made the project outside with him watching me from the pushchair, he was as good as gold and laughed every time I drilled or made a loud noise!

I made a couple of A frames to start with

Keen to learn!

Two A frames put together, 4ft apart, bracing added next

Adding the guttering to hold the plants

The planter in place but it will be moved soon.

For the last few years when I've been doing roofs for customers houses I've been saving the old gutter with this project in mind. 

Although the guttering isn't that deep I'm only going to grow alpine strawberries in this as a test project. I've positioned them in a area by a shed and a wall so they should have a really warm little micro climate. I've made this frame movable at the moment as the area under it is going to be slabbed, but if it works I might fix it back to the shed and remove the rear support, making it much smaller.

The frame should be really easy to net and I have plans to use a solar pump to push water to the top of the frame and let it filter back down - hopefully this will work! 

I grew a big batch of alpines strawberries from seed last year and I'll post another picture when this is all planted up (I've got to make some stop ends for it as well yet). This could easily be used for salads as well.

What do you think? 

Anyone else grow vertically and have any success?

Purple Strawberry Seeds

April really is the time to get sowing, and I've got hundreds of seeds to plant over the next few weeks. 

One that I'm sowing that's a little different is these purple strawberry seeds, apparently they're a great cropper and have a slightly minty taste, cropping later in the year from seeds sown now. 
I've got lots of these seeds so if anyone wants any let me know!

####update
April fool!
Well you lot are too sharp for me! I didn't manage to fool anyone! 

Strawberry Growing

I'm pretty good at growing most things but I suck at growing strawberries. I'm not sure what I do wrong but they never seem to do very well. 

Working at a friends house today I think I saw the answer. 

Strawberries in guttering

 I know growing plants in guttering isn't new but I thought this was a great use of space and at "toddler" hight a great way for children to pick their own. 

Great use of space

There were loads of strawberries ready to eat and I imagine it's far easier to control any runners or weeds and watering would be straight forward! 

I might have to try this on our fence at the front of the house next year and see if we can grow a few more berries this way. I've got some old guttering saved from a job back in the winter that would be ideal for it.

Anyone else been growing in this way or similar?

Bye Bye Allotment

I made my last trip over to the old allotment today.

Its sad that I've got to leave (as now its too far away) as I really enjoyed the social side of it, but that did have it's downsides sometimes, you'd go down there with a list of jobs and get none of them done due to talking! The soil was terrible down there (heavy clay) and it would make doing any job a nightmare.

The last visit wasn't for sentimental reasons though, it was to remove as many plants as I possibly could for my new veg garden.

I went thinking there wasn't that many to take, but the list got longer and longer. In the end I removed globe artichokes, fennel, sea kale, angelica, a rose, comfrey, sage, sweet cicely, rhubarb, strawberries, mint, asparagus, some compost from the raised beds and some leeks for tea. The van was packed and the allotment plot looked quite bare as I drove away.

The one really surprising plant was the strawberries as I put in about 15 plants last year then didn't do anything with them, we didn't have a single strawberry off them but they ran rampant. Really rampant it turns out as when I dug them up there was over 75 plants rooted in a 4x4 raised bed.

This evening I managed to plant everything in (although the fence still isn't finished so open to rabbits) but I had to limit myself to 50 strawberry plants - I have a feeling I may have gone over the top as it is!