Wooden Strawberry Barrel

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by Adobestock/Renato

Grow 20 plants in the space of one with a wooden strawberry barrel by learning how to make a garden tower from a barrel to maximize your growing area.

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 stoop-labor 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.

Finding a Wooden Barrel

  • Updated on Dec 13, 2022
  • Originally Published on Jun 1, 1996
Tagged with: containder gardening, growing strawberries, planters
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