For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."
how to grow strawberries from bare roots and save money
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This year I revived my strawberry patch and planted 80 new strawberries from bare roots. My old bed had plants that were a few years old, and last summer I noticed berry production dropping significantly from the original plants. So, I dug up the older plants and put in 80 bare-root strawberries with some daughter plants that I'd propagated from runners. Our nighttime lows have been between 25°F and 35°F for the past few weeks, but there's already new growth! That's one of the benefits of bare-root strawberries—being able to plant them long before my last frost date—but there are a few other perks too, namely budget and variety. If you were to buy 80 strawberry starts from a nursery, it would cost a small fortune. (I see them for just under $5 per little 4-inch pot in my local garden center.) And you'd probably only find a handful of varieties, some of which might not even be suitable for your climate. (Yes, nurseries do that, and it drives me crazy. Make sure you choose the right strawberry type for your climate because most nurseries won't tell you otherwise!) Bare-root strawberries, on the other hand, are really affordable when you need to buy a lot at once, and you can find nearly any variety in bare-root form from a farm or online nursery. Find out when you can plant them (the earlier the better!), how to plant them, and how to maximize production. (Hint: You'll have to sacrifice some flowers.) The baby chicks that we got three weeks ago just moved into their new home—for now. They're still too young to live outside in our freezing weather, but they've upgraded from a cardboard box to a small animal pen. They've been in the pen for a week now, but I already feel like they're starting to outgrow that! They're also getting pretty feisty these days, and all but one of the chicks loves to hop onto the edge of the pen when I open it up to refill their food and water. (The last one is the smallest/youngest, so I'm sure she'll get up there soon.) I'm guessing the chicks have about two or three more weeks left of being our house pets 😬 before we start introducing them to our existing flock. (I've written a guide to integrating chickens here.) Outside, we're still in the process of a major yard cleanup—my husband's been making his own biochar (a type of carbon-rich soil amendment), and I've been moving plants around in my perennial beds and cutting back cover crops to make room for this summer's new crops. Timing is a little tricky this year because I'll be gone for half the summer (to start working on my new book, The Route 66 Cookbook), so I'm trying to figure out what can be planted now and still be good by the time I get back. For sure, there will be a lot of heat-tolerant salad greens in the mix. 😁 P.S. Bare-root strawberries look kinda crazy, but planting them doesn't have to be intimidating. Here's how you can start a strawberry patch from scratch—on a budget. P.P.S. What did you plant? When did you plant it? When did it bloom, ripen, and die back? These are all things we'd love to know when we're in the thick of gardening season, but often don't have a way to record them. My Ultimate Garden Diary can help with that! This infinitely refillable and printable garden planner, logbook, and journal can be customized to your needs year after year, and it works for every type of garden (ornamental or edible). |
Garden Betty
Gardening made easy, life made simpler.
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."