Cheapest Way to Get LOTS of Strawberries Fast
Strawberries are a ‘gateway plant’ for getting kids to garden. If you plant them, they will come, and snack, and snack and snack.Having just a basket of strawberry plants is not enough. How can you avoid the ‘dirty dozen’ woes of supermarket strawberries and get your own harvestable crop fast, cheap and easily?
As soon as a ripe strawberry appears it is gobbled up by my daughter. Our patch never seems to be big enough, and now with a second hungry little goblin, it was time to expand our strawberry patch.
4 Ways to Get Strawberry Plants
Start from Seed
Bare Root Plants
Live Plants
Runners
If you can score runners from someone in your community, it is going to be the cheapest (aka free) method. But runners are often available later in the season and won’t typically bear fruit that year.
Seeds are cheap, arguably free if you save them from a fruit, but starting seeds can be finnicky, time consuming and plants take time to mature and bear fruit.
Plants (often sold as baskets) are the ‘instant’ way to have strawberry plants but come at the highest price point per plant.
Bare root plants are the cheapest and quickest way to establish a strawberry patch and collect a harvest the same year.
Types of Strawberry Plants:
June-Bearing: If you do strawberry picking at a farm, this is a perfect example of June-bearing strawberries. They generate a great quantity of fruit, which all come ripe around the same time, allowing for a bulk harvest. This is perfect if you like to preserve (jam, can, freeze) your harvest.
Ever-bearing: These produce fruit in intervals. They will still provide just as much fruit as a June-bearing variety but spread out over our growing season. They typically have a slight lull in production during the heat of August but otherwise pump out fruit from June to end of September. This is perfect if you like snacking and don’t have time to deal with preserving.
Native to Southern Ontario: These are where it began! The fruit is much smaller then the cultivars available in the other two categories but it is still edible and delicious. These options are frequently used as a ground cover (grass or lawn alternative) for low or no traffic areas rather then harvesting as food crops. This is perfect if you want to naturalize an area, support the ecosystem but still have edible opportunities.
Why Are Bare Root Strawberries Cheap?
Strawberries are cold-hardy perennials, which means they ‘hibernate’ or go dormant, to get through our long winters. Bare root plants are dormant strawberry plants. While dormant, they do not have the same moisture, soil or light requirements that a live plant has. In short they do not face the same fragility of a live plant. This makes processing and shipping logistics much easier, and the cost savings trickle along to the end customer.
You can get bundles of plants, in small packages, which can handle sitting in a box, in a warehouse for weeks without any care.
When to Buy Bare Root Strawberry Plants?
Because they are dormant plants, they are available in late winter to early spring, in physical retail locations.
Online orders can often be placed at any time, but the plants will not be shipped out until late winter.
When to Plant Bare Root Strawberry Plants?
As soon as the soil is workable. This isn’t a date on the calendar because each garden will thaw and drain at a different pace according to that area’s microclimate.
What you are looking for is:
The ground is no longer frozen,
Soil has the moisture level of a well rung-out sponge.
A visual example of this is included in the video at the beginning of this post.
Bare Root Plant
Locate the “crown” of the strawberry plant. This is the thicker, thumb sized part of the plant, above the thin, noodle like roots.
How to Plant Bare Root Strawberry Plants?
I like to rehydrate anything bare root (asparagus, berries, tubers like dahlias) before planting by giving them a little soak in a bowl of water for 30 minutes or so.
Bare root strawberries are usually packed in bunches and grouped using an elastic band. Locate this and gently remove it. Spilt the bunches into individual plants.
Locate the “crown” of the strawberry plant. This is the thicker, thumb sized part of the plant, above the thin, noodle like roots. We want to keep the crown above the soil so it doesn’t rot, but bury the roots.
Dig a shallow hole, fan the roots out and press the soil back over the roots, keeping the crown above the soil.
Add a layer of natural mulch to protect against frost and competition (weeds). Because strawberries are edible we should be mindful of the type of mulch used. Colorants (black or red dyes) and synthetic materials (rubber) have the potential to leach into the soil where the plants can then uptake those elements.
April’s showers will handle the watering, so if you haven’t turned your water back on yet, don’t fret.
As spring chugs along, your bare root plants will wake up and turn into a lovely green patch of plants that should quickly provide fruit due to their maturity at purchase.
As runners develop you can increase the size of your patch or once they have roots, share them with your community.
Strawberry plants are the perfect addition to a garden whether your focus is native planting, regenerative plantings, edible gardening or kid focused spaces.
