Early Strawberries

Well, I've read that you can bring on earlier strawberries by moving them into the green house in early spring.  So this year I thought I'd try it out.  We only have a very small green house but it gets lots of use and make a big difference to anything that is frost tender. In order to get a good idea of how much difference this actually makes I chose to take in a pair of strawberries that were the same age and in the same size pots as two other strawberries that would be left to take their chances outside.

I only thought of doing this in mid March so they won't be as early as they could have been but I can have another go next year.  As far as I know strawberries like to be nice and cold during the winter so don't take them in too early.  I'm not too sure on when is the earliest you can bring them in however.  I'll do more trials next year :)

At the start of April I took some photos to compare the two sets of strawberries.  The photo on the top is of the ones in the greenhouse and you can see a huge difference already.  The strawberries that are outside have no real signs of waking up after the winter yet while the ones in the green house have loads of new leaves.

And yesterday I took some more photos .. You can see that there are loads of flowers on the ones in the greenhouse and non visible on the ones outside. In fact one of the inside strawberries has the beginnings of fruit on it...yay. The outside pair have a couple of sprigs with flower buds developing but it's clear that they are about 3 weeks behind the other ones.  If I had brought the indoor pair in sooner  they you would probably get strawberries at least a month earlier.  By the way this is an unheated greenhouse as the winters here are fairly mild.  Another experiment that I am doing is to see how much difference liquid fertilizer like comfrey and manure make to the number of fruits.  With each pair I am fertilizing one and not the other and I can see that both the fertilized ones are a little ahead of the non fertilized one. I like doing these kinds of experiments so that I can see for myself how effective our methods are.  Also we can learn how to improve on our methods each year.  This year I'm just doing some basic trials but next year I'll get a little bit more detailed.  Basically I'm looking for simple and natural ways of increasing our yield.  I'm not going to look for the absolute maximum possible, just a little more.

 

Comments

[skyguy]

got directed from Limerick Blogger, great site Im defentally going to keep logging in my back is tiny so I might even try growing some fruit in pots too