Whiskerton Garden's strawberry patch, which was put in three years ago, has not been thinned out significantly. With a not-so-great strawberry year in the garden, it seemed that the plants had become too crowded. Each plant was competing for light and nutrients so they were smaller and produced not-as-tasty fruit.
So this year we are making a big effort to thin out the strawberry bed significantly. With all the extra strawberry plants - we have been extracting about 500 per week for several weeks now - I am giving them to other Urban Farm Collective garden managers to spread in their gardens. Hopefully in a couple years there will be strawberry patches all over the UFC that are producing and we will have a significant amount of strawberries at market - not just two pints like this year!
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| Collected strawberries and sawdust. We put strawberry plants in plastic bags with sawdust and water. |
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| The wet sawdust keeps strawberry roots moist for the week they will be out of the ground. |
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| The great thing about thinning the strawberry patch is some of the extracted plants are already 2 or three years old so new beds will produce fruit next year. Gardens won't have to wait for two years before getting a harvest. These established root crowns will also have a much higher transplant survival rate than first-year strawberry runners. |
