Friday, June 21, 2013

Planting Strawberries

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An extremely kind fellow blogger gave away this nifty dibble handmade by her husband  of Bepasgarden, on her blog and I was just looking through my posts and realized that I have never blogged about it or how really handy it is.  I used it a few months ago when I planted my strawberry plants and it was the perfect tool for the job and looked good too.  I plant my berries in a 3’X6’ raised bed.  I dig small trenches between the rows and plant 2 rows with alternate placement of the plants to give them the most room to spread.  I have 3 rows of berries in this bed with 2 trenches that I use to deep water the roots.  I fill each trench with water then lightly sprinkle over head.  The berries I planted in this bed were bought bare root and are a fairly new variety called Sweet Ann.  The were breed in our area by Lassen Canyon Nursery.  It is a day neutral variety which means that it will continue to bear fruit all summer until frost.  It is suppose to produce a very large and very sweet berry.  Can’t wait to compare it to my favorite from last year called Mara de Bois, which was the best berry I have ever tasted.  I now have 2 beds of Mara and one of Sweet Ann. 

Let the strawberry competition begin!

IMG_1501 Update:  Somehow this post never got posted and now I have been eating strawberries from both beds.  So I can tell you that the handy dibble did a great job at helping me to get those roots firmly in the ground and they are now producing lots of lovely berries for me and some for the bugs.

3 comments:

will said...

So how did the 2 berries do? Any other observations?

Will~

ferne said...

Will, I can not reply to you directly because I can't get to your address, but the answer to your question is that they both did very well. Mara de Bois is still our all time favorite and produced berries constantly all summer as long as I kept them picked. Sweet Anne was not as heavy a producer but, what she did produce was large, sweet fruit. I like them both very much, but the flavor of Mara is still supburb and her productivity matches. The berries are a bit smaller than Anne though.

will said...

Hi Ferne,
Thanks for your input....it is a big help. I have Mara but it is prone to diseases here in coastal Maine. I am trying raised beds this year. Sweet Anne is not an easy berry to find, but its flavors sounded very desire able to try and obtain. Does it produce runners?