Nature and Gardening

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All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.

See also our Environment community, which is focused on weather, climate, climate change, and stuff like that.

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This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

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Strawberries are ripening already! My absolute favorite part of the summer garden. (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Beautiful! How are you keeping the critters out of those?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm doing a much better job than I did last year. First- I have thinned out the plants to leave only the largest mature plants with plenty of space in between. I water only in the morning so that the surface is dry by night time when slugs come. I have also laid bark mulch (straw would be good too I think) which helps with slugs. Then finally I got some cheap bird netting from Amazon. So far we have only seen two berries with slug bites. Last year at least half had damage. If you or anyone else knows much about this I am trying to find out something: I want to cultivate the runners which will grow after the berries. Next summer, can I harvest from those runners or do I need to remove the flowers and wait until two summers from now to harvest berries from those runners?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We've been able to harvest fruits off of the new runners from our established plants in their first year. Strawberries only produce reliably for a few years, so a two year wait will reduce the yields and increase management time dramatically.

Which varieties are you growing?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Okay great I was hoping that’s the case. I have just Rainer strawberries which are June bearers