Make An Old-Time Strawberry Barrel

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Ah, strawberries... sweet, juicy, fragrant first fruit of the year. Ice cream's irreplaceable sidecar, and arguably the world's best snack. Oh yeah, there's also the small matter of pruning, mulch, fertilizing, and waiting a year for the delectable return. Plus, established berry plants produce a network of runners—long spreading stems with a baby plant at each node that can snarl so densely that fruiting is reduced, disease spreads readily and the plot must be raked out every fall and dug under and replanted or moved every two or three years. The road to heaven is paved with work.

How'd you like to have the equivalent of a 25-foot garden row on only four square feet of land, right outside the sunny south door of the house—without the stooplabor of a berry patch, and with fruit coming on much earlier? This can be done by flanking your front door with a matched pair of old-time strawberry barrels, each hosting 18 or 20 plants on the three or four square feet of land that would ordinarily be occupied by but one or two berry plants.

In a barrel, each plant remains a solitary and can be treated as tenderly as a house plant. Fruit stays off the ground, away from rots and molds, from marauding slugs, bugs, and meadow mice. Air flows freely, so diseases do not spread. And runners are either absent or captured in small plastic pots and the baby plants used to replace failing parent plants in following years.

The Barrel

First, though, you have to locate a suitable barrel. Iron-bound, wood-slat barrels are no longer used to ship pickles, molasses, nuts, bolts, rum, salt fish, nails, crackers, and more, as they were 100 years ago when every farm had a 40-gallon water barrel under the downspout and 5- to 30gallon berry barrels at each side of the front porch steps.

You still can find flimsy little nail kegs made of thin pine slats and wire hoops that aren't worth the bother. And you may be able to locate a good old hardwood keg in the back room of the local feed store. The homesteading-gear catalogs that advertise in MOTHER sell new-made goodquality casks by mail if your pocketbook can take it.

But the only potential real strawberry barrels I know of that are commonly available at retail are 30-gallon kegs fashioned from staves of sweet white oak or beech wood. The kegs are cut in half and sold as patio planters for about $30 apiece at major lumberyards and home and garden supply outlets. Some are brand new, of raw wood or wax-coated, and others are ex-whiskey-aging barrels from Tennessee and Kentucky that are charred inside and still carry the fine aroma of Jack Daniels Old No. 7. By law, these well-made steelstrapped, white-oak casks can't be used to age whiskey but once, so when you make berry barrels of them you are recycling a prime American forest product that has already served a great and noble cause. Your strawberries might even carry a hint of aperitif fraises.

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