Anyone who's been vegetable gardening for more than a couple of years has a good handle on some of the hardier plants. They include many herbs, such as oregano, parsley, and peppermint. They include certain greens, such as kale, Swiss chard, and corn lettuce. Some are hardy because of their resistant to below-freezing temperature. Some are drought-hardy. Some are both.
But of all the types of plants that come back year after year, regardless of how cold the winter, regardless of how little water they get, one type of plant you never hear about surviving very long: fruit-bearing plants that have been confined in a container whose soil has been allowed to dry up.
But I recently discovered differently. I recently discovered that strawberry plants, grown in containers, can miraculously come back to life after being completely neglected during a drought.
As a last ditch effort to protect our strawberries from being eaten by rodents, I had my husband build long boxes several feet off the ground. He lined them with leftover pond liner and filled them with potting soil, then planted in brand-new strawberry plants.
Being new plants, and in disease-free soil, the theory was that they wouldn't get anthracnose. However, the plants must have contracted the fungus in the nursery, because the very first berries they bore showed signs of the disease.
I was ready to give up on them by June. But I had my husband continue to water them. Because maybe if we started spraying early the next spring, we'd be able to keep the anthracnose at bay, at least until we harvested a few pints of berries.
However, we're off the water grid, and most of last year any rain that was forecast went around us. The water in the small pond he was using for the strawberries disappeared much more quickly than it had since my husband first dug it out.
I regretted putting the plants in containers, because strawberry roots in the ground can survive a drought. Not so when they're in a container. You can even see the new shoots from last summer and fall that tried to get to the ground, and didn't make it, that they eventually dried up.
Of course, that was going to happen to the plants in the boxes, as well.
Or, so I thought. Because that's what the gardening gurus say. And, indeed, by the time autumn arrived, every single leaf had dried to a crisp. I was certain that the roots had dried up and died, too. A few of the new shoots made it to the ground, rooted in in time, and survived. But many of the shoots dried up before they could find their way into the soil.
Well, watch the video below and look at the strawberry plants now.
Check out the green leaves. The flowers. The baby strawberries. Granted, since the two sleet storms in February, we've been getting more or less the amount of precipitation that is normal for this area. Still, that usually hasn't amounted to more than an inch a week. Not nearly enough for containers, especially for the ones on the bottom, and sometimes it's been ten days between rain showers.
Turns out, strawberry roots can survive a certain amount of drought. And the actual plants don't need nearly as much water as we thought in order to bear fruit. Of course, they'll produce more and better quality fruit if they get water on a regular basis, so we're going to start taking care of the plants. We've even begun a natural fungicide regimen that we hope will delay, if not prevent, the anthracnose that always has ended up ruining more than half our potential crop.
And after the plants are finished bearing fruit for the season? We're not going to water them nearly as much as we have been. Just enough to keep the roots alive, and at least some of the leaves green.
As for the ones growing in the ground? I'll never worry about them again.
Happy strawberry gardening. And remember: the gurus don't always get everything right.
