Should I GIVE UP On Growing STRAWBERRIES?

When you do online research about growing strawberries, all the sites that show up in the first page of results make it sound easy. I even once wrote an article about how easy it was to grow strawberries. 

Because it was my first year to do so in the super-humid climate we live in, and I was stupid.
(For a really, truly easy fruit to grow, you gotta try growing goumis!)

Now, growing the actual plants is a no-brainer. But most people don’t grow strawberries because they’re going to harvest the leaves (although you can make a high-vitamin-C tea out of them). They grow strawberries for the fruit.

Strawberries + rain + humidity = FRUSTRATION!

 

What I didn’t realize until this year, my fourth year of growing strawberries, and what nobody else seems to be saying online, is that if you live in a humid subtropical climate and don’t spray a fungicide, you’re going to end up with rotting strawberries.

 

And it’s not just a matter of “oh, well, most of the fruit rotted this year. We’ll do better next year” because the cause of the rotting is a fungus called anthracnose. And this fungus will hang out in both the soil and the plant, waiting to inflict its damage the next spring. 

Oh joy, oh splendor. 

I did spray my strawberry patch with copper for several weeks. This fungicide is supposed to prevent anthracnose. However, I still had most of my fruit rot – on many berries, before they even began to ripen.

(My apologies about poor quality of the following photos - the sun was just in the wrong place when I took them. If you look carefully, you can see the rotting spots facing the camera.)

One reason is that I started spraying too late – you’re supposed to start spraying as soon as the buds start forming. I didn’t start until there were berries growing (because I hadn’t done the research on the problem until then). Another reason is that except in years of drought, our springs consist of several weeks (read: two to three months) when we have rain several times every week. We sometimes can half or more of our annual rainfall in the spring. 

And guess what causes the anthracnose to become active? You guessed it – wet plants and berries. 

Last fall, before I learned about the cause of strawberry rot, I thought that getting the plants off the ground would prevent the rot. I thought the rot mainly came from the berries sitting against the ground. If I could just get them to grow where they could hang in the air. 

My failed vertical strawberry garden - 2 rows planted on this side, another row on the other. It worked for the guy on YouTube whose video I watched, but not for me. The idea is to have a rope going through the container down into the PVC pipe. You fill up the pipe through the open end (right in the photo) and the rope is supposed to wick the water up into the soil. Well, it does, but apparently not enough for the robust strawberry plant.

Nope. Most of the strawberries there rotted, too. Number one, they weren’t protected from the rain. Number two, they were already infected with the fungus.

A few weeks ago, I almost gave up on growing strawberries. 

But I can’t. I'm a strawberry snob. See, I grew up with home-grown strawberries - sweet and juicy - and I can’t stand the hardly-ever-sweet-and-usually-moldy berries they sell in the store. Even the Whole Foods brand of frozen strawberries are often full of not-quite-ripe, or even only half-ripe, fruit. 

My solution

 

Part One

I am going to give up on one thing: the vertical strawberry garden. I’ll use the structure for growing something else, maybe spinach in the winter?

There are sixty strawberry plants there right now. My plan is to keep them alive, then at the end of the summer cut off all the leaves and stems so that only the crowns and roots are left. I’m going to pull them out of the bags and let them soak in a hydrogen peroxide solution for a few hours, hoping that will kill any remnant of the fungus. 

After the soak, I will plant them in a two- or three-bucket tower, per the instructions in the following video:

I don’t know how yet, but somehow I’m going to make a kind of umbrella over each tower so that rain will have a hard time pummeling the strawberries planted there. And then, I’m just going to see how it goes.

Part Two 

I’m also going to experiment with the strawberries in the ground. Right now I’m in the process of thinning out the plants that are in the original rows I created so that they are nine to twelve inches apart. I’m figuring five rows of ten, so fifty plants there. In the fall, I’m going to pull up any suckers, cut off all the foliage, then spray them all with hydrogen peroxide, giving the ground a good soaking of the solution, as well.

First row I thinned out.

The rest of the strawberries that have yet to be thinned.

At some point late in the year, I’ll have DH help me place a hoop over each plant, plus one in between each plant. When rain is forecast, I will drape the hoops with plastic so that no water can hit the plants or any budding berries.

Maybe. I'll have to see how feasible that idea is.

Finally, I’m going to start spraying them once a week as soon as I see the first flower on the first plant.

And I’ll see how it goes. Hopefully better than it’s been going. But by 2020 I may be growing strawberries indoors.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Especially when you’re a homesteading strawberry snob living in a humid area.