Strawberry Planter Update

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Kristin Higgins
6 years ago
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I was three things at the beginning of this gardening season. Like many of you, I was full of energy, full of big plans and full of big-time denial. I do this every spring, by the way.

1 I was three things at the beginning of this gardening season. Like many of you, I was full of energy, full of big plans and full of big-time denial. I do this every spring, by the way. It s kind of my thing. For some reason, all it takes is one winter for me to completely forget about everything that happened to my garden the year before. Squash bug? Never heard of them. Cucumber beetle? Probably won t be a problem this year. Cabbage loopers? Heh, heh, nothing to worry about there. I m pretty sure they ve become extinct. It s a moth miracle, really. I think it s looking at our perfectly tilled gardens and our tiny little healthy plants at the beginning of the season that makes us think that nothing can go wrong. I mean, everything looks so great at the beginning. There are no holes in the leaves, no stems that have been chewed away, no raccoons peering at you surrounded by a bushel of tomatoes with exactly one bite taken out of each. It s just the way we are as gardeners. If we weren t ridiculously optimistic (and forgetful), we d never garden again. It was with that optimism that I planted strawberries last season. I saw people at my community garden picking enough strawberries to fill a pantry, so I knew my plantings would at least get me a few jars of jam. The first year you grow strawberries you don t pick them. You let them flower and then pinch the flowers off. That way you get a stronger plant for years to come. So that s what I did last season. I pinched off my flowers and watched everyone else with more established plants as they harvested buckets and buckets of berries. A beautifully ripened red strawberry 1/7

2 Strawberries have exactly one pest: the mouth. The mouth of a rabbit, the mouth of a vole, the mouth of a squirrel you get the idea. That s why people put netting, which is just annoying enough to keep the mouths away, over their strawberry crops. But at my community garden, a lot of the gardeners didn t use netting, and they were still getting massive amounts of strawberries. Clearly I lived in a very specific area that only bred critters that don t like strawberries. I m very lucky that way. A beautifully ripened strawberry that some critter has taken a bite out of 2/7

So this year, I expected I would be harvesting an insane amount of strawberries, like everyone else I knew. Mine were planted in my front-yard vegetable garden. I had around 20 plants or so.

3 So this year, I expected I would be harvesting an insane amount of strawberries, like everyone else I knew. Mine were planted in my front-yard vegetable garden. I had around 20 plants or so. In the spring, I decided to try out a tiered planter as well to see how the strawberries would do in there. Mainly I thought it would look good, and it did. The author s lovely looking tiered strawberry planter 3/7

4 I dug up 10 of my front-yard plants and transplanted them into the planter in the spring. And then I waited. In my area, June berries always come up around Father s Day, so I made sure a week or so in advance that I had everything I needed for making jam. I sterilized my jars, bought the pectin and had a dump truck back up to the house with the 742 cups of sugar needed for eight or so jars of jam. Jam takes a lot of sugar. Someone told me once how good my jam was, and I had to explain to them that everyone s jam tastes good. The only ingredients are strawberries and sugar, so it would take an especially skilled messer-upper to make that taste bad. As the days before Father s Day approached, I noticed there wasn t a single berry on my front-yard plants. More specifically, there were a lot of berries; they just weren t attached to the plants anymore. They were on the ground or in the bellies of the squirrels in my neighborhood. I know this because one of the squirrels knocked on my front door asking if I had whipped cream. The tiered planter, on the other hand, was perfect. It was literally drooping with beautiful, ripe strawberries crying out to be made into jewel-colored jam. Now the biggest problem people have with strawberries is that they pick them too early. Just because they re red, doesn t mean they re ripe. They take many days of being red before they re actually sweet and ripe. Knowing this, I left my strawberries on the plants until they had been red for about a week and were almost soft to the touch. While not a lot of people know that this is the perfect time to pick them, squirrels, on the other hand, are all over that information. The rat-faced little beasts left every single berry alone until they were the perfect ripeness, at which point they gnawed their way through them like well like a bunch of rat-faced little beasts. Just by chance, I was staring out my kitchen window into the backyard when one of them was scurrying Tasmanian-devil style around my planter. So, I ran out and threw a piece of netting over the whole planter. The rest of my berries were safe, but after taking a closer look, I realized I didn t have anywhere near enough to make jam. Unless I was making jam for a family of one squirrel. Next year I ll throw the netting over the tiered planter just when the berries get red. That way I won t have to look at the netting all season long, but I ll still save my strawberries. I do love planting the strawberries in the tiered planter because it looks really nice in my backyard setting, plus throwing a net over it for the last week or so of ripening is no big deal. 4/7

5 Can you spot the critter in this photo? 5/7

6 Squirrel alert! Enjoying a delicious ripe berry. 6/7

7 I couldn t figure out how the other gardeners did it, though. How did they end up with so many strawberries without using any netting? Then I actually looked at their strawberry plots, as opposed to their strawberry-filled baskets. They had hundreds of strawberry plants. Basically they planted enough strawberries to fill every single critter within a 20-mile radius, with another hundred or so plants left over for themselves. It takes an insane amount of strawberry plants to produce a nice supply of berries! Way more than 20 plants, shall we say. The moral of this story? It doesn t matter. Because by next spring, we ll all have forgotten it. Text and photos by Karen Bertelsen Karen Bertelsen is a Gemini Award nominated television host who has appeared on some of Canada s major networks including HGTV, W Network, Slice and MuchMoreMusic. Three years ago she started the blog The Art of Doing Stuff ( as a creative outlet for her writing and endless home projects. The Art of Doing Stuff now receives over half a million views per month and has been featured in Better Homes & Gardens, Style at Home and Canadian Gardening magazines. 7/7

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