Strawberries - A Success Story

After my last gardening post, I mentioned that was one crop that didn't appear to be a total failure.  Of course, part of the reason for that is probably because it's crop was the result of work from previous years, not this past year's. 

That crop is the strawberry.
 

We planted these strawberry plants three (or four???) years ago.  I carefully followed the planting instructions and then diligently plucked little white and yellow flower and little white and yellow flower as the sprouted, delaying strawberry satisfaction but ensuring that the plants would get strong enough for a nice crop the following year. 

The "following year" the crop was only so-so.  I'm not sure what went wrong.  Perhaps nothing. But the harvest was minimal at best, and we struggled with slugs like crazy. 

This year, we have a nice lush bed of strawberry plants.

Better yet, they are actually producing decent strawberries!!!!

One crop is a June bearing variety, and the other is an "everbearing" variety.  The June bearers are definitely a nicer, larger berry, but they only produce one - maybe two - crops per year and then are done.  The evebearers, on the other hand, keep producing throughout the summer but the berries are smaller, not as nicely shaped and later in the season sometimes don't taste quite as good.  If I was to do this garden again, I would go with a June bearing and a July or August bearing - that way, I think I'd get decent sized crops of nice looking berries but not all at once.

Each container holds about a pound of strawberries.  I'd say that I got about 10 pounds in total this year.  That was a LOT of berries, especially considering that I don't eat them. 

DH got to have a lot of fruit salad the past few weeks, and he loved it.  The crazy thing is that with berries being in season right now, strawberries are actually super cheap at the grocery store - as cheap as $2.50 a pound. So assuming that we got 10 pounds at that price, we're really only saving $25 a year by growing our own.

Even I think these look tasty!!!

But that's not really the point of having a garden, is it?  I've known since the first year that this garden was going to be a hobby, an investment of sorts, with more or less no guarantee of return.  In that case, any return should be considered a success, and the strawberries definitely get the "student of the year" award so far for this garden!