Strawberry Patch

This was the year to start our strawberry patch! I have been wanting to do this for ages, but the timing was never right. A friend of mine gave me her family's inside information on strawberries from a guru named E. Gordon Wells, Jr.

He suggests planting them in early April, and the variety he likes best is Albion, and ever bearing variety that produces first in the spring and latest in the fall. He says it produces large berries abundantly, instead of small berries with lots of seeds. We went on a field trip to Cooks Greenhouse in Orem to find them. 

They had them in flats, but the nice guy at Cooks gave me a little lesson in bare root strawberries and suggested I buy them 25 bare roots per pot, which is much more cost effective.

The wagons were so fun. That place is a gardener's paradise! Everything in the greenhouses is already blooming and just tempting you to bring something home. We spent a good hour wandering and admiring.

They don't look like much, but each pot really did have 25 baby bare root strawberries banded together. 

We weeded and prepared our plot under the fruit trees. The soil was amended last year with some mink manure, so we didn't add anything this year. Mr. Wells suggests adding peat moss and sulfur, but the Cook's guy told me to try what we've got and if the strawberries start turning yellow, we can always add sulfur or ammonium sulfate later. We have yet to get drip lines to each plant, so for now we are hand watering.

Sometimes gardening makes me nervous because you spend a lot of money on the front end, and just hope and pray that things are "fruitful"! But spring is full of promise.... we shall see!