Grow Berries In Your Back Yard!

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In order to enjoy a longer cropping season, it's a good idea to plant at least two varieties (one early, one late) of this delicious fruit. Your agricultural extension service (check the county listing in the White Pages) can provide you with a list of recommended varieties for your locality. In my experience—and I've grown and inspected many different crops—the following varieties can nearly always be counted on:

Fairfax —an early ripener—produces extremely soft, dark red berries that—although unsuitable for freezing—are superb when it comes to fresh-off-the-runner eating.

Guardian is a newly developed midseason variety that offers unusually good disease resistance and yields large, tasty, bright red berries.

Premier (early), Midway (mid-season), and Sparkle (late) are other widely available varieties and they produce large crops of delicious berries that are suitable for freezing.

One unusual domesticated variety that closely matches the wild strawberry in appearance and flavor is the alpine strawberry, Baron Solemacher. Baron Solemacher plants cover themselves with beautiful white flowers, and because this variety is so decorative, you'll often find it listed in the flower—not the fruit—section of seed catalogs. And, since it doesn't set runners, this alpine strawberry must be grown from seed that is started indoors ten weeks ahead of outdoor planting time. The seed is tiny (and germination sometimes erratic) but a fine crop of berries—fully twice the size of wild strawberries—can be grown the first year. Just remember that the seed requires light to germinate: Press the tiny grains into the soil's surface and keep the area moist and well lit.

I've seen many ingenious ways to grow strawberries (including the "strawberry barrel" . . see the "May-June Almanac" foldout in MOTHER NO. 45), but the easiest method I know is one in which plants are simply grown all over the top of a low mound of compost-enriched soil in an odd corner of the garden. (Having grown strawberries in regimental straight lines for many years—and having worked hard to keep those lines straight—I was delighted to discover the "mound method", which is so productive and yet so easy on the back!)

Regardless of how you arrange your plants, remember that strawberries love soils that are loaded with organic matter. Well-rotted manure, garden compost, and leaf mold are all highly beneficial to the berries, even if you also feed them with a general-purpose fertilizer.

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