Strawberries quick and easy to grow

Given how quickly strawberries begin to bear fruit and how easily they are grown, it’s a wonder that strawberry beds aren’t as common in backyards as lawns are in front yards.

The most compelling reason to grow strawberries is, of course, flavour.

Variety selection and premature harvest make grocers’ berries large and firm, but usually not much else. In your backyard, though, you can grow the most flavourful varieties, and wait to pick them until they’re sweet and oozing strawberry-ness. At that point, perishability doesn’t matter because the berries need not travel further than arm’s length to your mouth or a basket.

Depending on how soon you want to start eating strawberries, choose between “everbearers” and “junebearers.”

Everbearers offer the quickest crops, less than three months after planting, and bear all season long. Tristar is among the best of these types. Some of the older types bear in spring and fall only.

Junebearers come in greater variety and yield more, but wait to bear their first crop until the year after planting. Once started, they bear once per season, in spring or early summer. Planting two or more different junebearing varieties can extend the harvest.

Spring is a good time to plant strawberries, although they can also be planted in late summer or fall — if you can get plants then.

Your new plants may look forlorn, but don’t worry. They soon grow new roots and leaves. In fact, you can shear their roots back to 3 or 4 inches long with a scissors so you can more easily fan them out in the planting hole. Adjust the planting depth carefully, leaving only the top half-inch of the crown exposed so that it neither dries out from exposure nor suffocates from burial.

Ever wonder how such a luscious fruit came to be called “strawberry”? The name might reflect the plants’ habit of strewing about with runners, which are horizontal stems punctuated along their length by daughter plants. The daughter plants eventually root and make their own runners.

The name “strawberry” might also come from a centuries-old favourite mulch for strawberries: straw. No matter how the strawberry got its name, the plants love to be mulched. Mulch keeps the soil moist, suppresses weeds and keeps the fruit cleaner. Give strawberries a yearround, organic mulch.

Spacing for strawberry plants depends on your method of growing them.

With the “hill system,” you plant them close together — nine inches apart in a double row, with 9 inches between rows — and avoid future crowding by pinching off all runners. More plants are needed to get started, but initial yields are highest. With the “matted row system,” you set plants at wide spacing and allow plants to make runners like crazy.