How to Plant Strawberries in Raised Beds

Strawberry season is here so in this video we are going to talk about how to plant strawberries in raised beds. Hi I'm April from Resprout where I make gardening how-to and tip videos. If you're new here definitely subscribe below. Strawberries are a great plant for beginners to start with because there's virtually no diseases or pests. They're very easy to care for and who doesn't like strawberries? I'm going to take you through each of the steps including where to get the plants, the best type of plants to get, how to prep your soil with the right fertilizer, and get the right pH level. And then plant them in your raised bed at the right spacing. And if you stick around to the very end I'll show you how I kept my bare root strawberry plants alive for a couple weeks while I was working on prepping my strawberry bed. This year I bought my strawberries from Stark Brothers but I've bought strawberries from Rain Tree Nurseries as well and those are both really great places to get strawberries. Now there's two types of strawberries. There's everbearing and there's junebearing and they pretty much are what they sound like. So the junebearing is going to bear strawberries in June and the everbearing is going to bear throughout the season. I usually recommend junebearing though if you have a smaller area. My strawberry bed that I'm going to be doing this year is 14 feet by 3 feet so it's about 42 square feet. So I'm going to try the everbearing this year and see how that works for me. I decided to go with the TriStar everbearing variety from Stark Brothers which is a pretty popular variety. So the first thing we want to do is make sure we have the right soil type. Strawberries are what they call a heavy feeder which means they want high nutrient, high organic matter soil. So if you don't think you have that don't worry we're going to work on that today. Strawberries also like well draining soil and you can tell if you have well draining soil if it's nice and loose and there's no standing water after a hard rainstorm. If you need to improve the nutrient content of your soil the best thing to do is add compost preferably homemade compost and if you need to improve the draining of your soil you can add compost or peat moss. Those will both loosen the soil up and make it a lot lighter. Okay guys let's talk about pH. I know pH is super scary. I was scared of pH when I first started gardening. I totally ignored all the instructions about testing pH before you plant it. I said heck with it just throw it in the ground and I'm here to tell you that testing pH is super easy. You can get test kits online. I got my test kit from the local cooperative extension. It literally takes 10 or 15 minutes to test your soil. It will make a ton of difference especially if you are planting perennials that are going to be there for several seasons. I did a quick test on my new strawberry bed. It came out to over 7.2. Now strawberries need between 5.5 and 7 pH so I'm going to add a soil acidifier which will hopefully take that down a little bit. If your pH is too low you're going to want to add lime. So here's the acidifier I'm going to use. A lot of times these soil acidifiers are marketed for blueberries or they're even marketed for hydrangeas. Always follow the directions on the bag. Every soil acidifier is going to be different. The map on this says I need to apply 12 pounds per 100 square feet. Now my bed is 14 by 3 feet so that's 42 square feet instead of the 100 square feet on the package. So what I'm going to do is divide 42 square feet by 100 so that gives me 0.42 and then I'm going to multiply 0.42 times the 12 pounds and that gives me 5 pounds. So I'm going to apply 5 pounds to my bed. So sprinkle it as evenly as you can across the whole bed and we're going to incorporate it in just a minute. The fertilizer is always a great idea especially when you're putting in perennial plantings like strawberries that are going to be there for a couple seasons. You want to do one pound of 10-10-10 fertilizer per 100 square feet and if you can't find 10-10-10 fertilizer that's okay. Just try to get those three numbers the same. Those are the NPK values. Try to get 5-5-5 or 3-3-3 or failing that try to find a fertilizer that's marketed towards vegetable gardening and we can make it work. The math is very similar to the acidifier. You want to take the square footage of your bed. Mine is 14 by 3 so that comes out to 42 square feet and then I'm going to divide 42 square feet by 100 square feet so that comes out to 0.42 and then I'm going to times that by the one pound that is recommended for the 100 square feet so that comes out to 0.42 pounds but I am going to complicate things further because I could not find a 10-10-10 fertilizer. I found a 5-5-2 fertilizer which I have laying around and so what I'm going to do instead is double the amount of fertilizer so instead of 0.42 I'm going to apply 0.84 pounds to my bed. So just like the acidifier just sprinkle it on top as evenly as you can. So now that we got the acidifier and the fertilizer on top of the soil we just need to incorporate it into the top 3-8 inches of the soil. I like to use a garden fork for this. No reason to go crazy just mix it in real good and then come back in with the backside of a rake and get it all smooth again. So I think one of the more confusing things about strawberries is the spacing. There's a lot of different spacing systems out there. There's the matted row system, there's the space row system, there's the hill system but because we're doing a raised bed garden we can plant a little more intensely so we're going to do a 12-inch spacing. An easy way to get your spacing is to use a tape measure and then use the back of a rake to draw lines in the soil every 12 inches and where those lines cross in your garden beds is going to be where you want to plant a strawberry plant. So I know you guys are excited now we are finally getting to the thing. Now if your plants are coming directly out of the box try to plant on a cloudy day and that shocks the plant a little less. Now my plants have been outside for a while already so I went ahead and planted in the sun and it was fine. A good way to give the strawberries a good head start is to soak them ahead of time. Two hours is great. You can even start soaking them right at the beginning of this process before you even start the soil prep and then by the time you're done with the soil prep they'll probably be ready to go. When you get the bare root strawberry sometimes the roots are humongously long. You can actually trim the roots down to four or five inches. The reason why we trim the roots of the strawberries is because we want the roots to be straight when they're planted and not curled up and getting tangled up at the bottom of the planting hole. I'm going to show you guys a quick way to measure the strawberry root because nobody wants to pull out a measuring tape for every strawberry root. Take the measuring tape on your own hand measure from the tip of your middle finger to the center of your palm and measure out five inches and remember where that point is. On my hand that point is somewhere between those two lines on the middle of my palm and I'm going to use that as a marking point for when I trim the strawberries. Then you want to make a planting hole right where our lines cross in our bed. You can use a garden trowel or you can go gangsta like I do with my hands. Now let's talk about how deep to plant strawberries because I think that's the trickiest thing. This is the strawberry crown right here and where my fingers are that's where we want the soil line to be. That would be too low if the soil was there and that would be too high if the soil was there because it would cover up the crown. That's the magic spot right there. Take the trimmed strawberry plant hold it at the right level inside the hole making sure the roots are all inside and not curled up at the bottom then push the soil back around the firming it down and we're all set. We've planted but we're not done yet. Give the entire bed a really good solid soaking. The next step is adding mulch. The reason we want mulch is because that is going to keep the moisture in the soil it's going to keep the weeds down and most importantly for strawberries it's going to keep the strawberries off of the soil and the reason why that's important is because when the strawberries start touching the soil they start getting pests they start rotting and we definitely don't want that so use your mulch of choice. I actually keep a huge pile of fall leaves in the utility area at my house for exactly this purpose to use as mulch. So last but not least this is my favorite part you guys it's the label bling. We all need beautiful labels in our garden it's like jewelry for the garden okay people so get some nice labels you deserve it you just planted a whole bunch of stuff and got dirty so just make a nice label for yourself you'll be very happy put the date on it put the variety on it and for those new gardeners make sure you put the word strawberries on it because you might forget and also there's going to be people who come into your garden that want to know about your garden and if they see some labels they're going to get very impressed with you all right so don't forget the label bling. To review you want to get your bare root strawberries from a reputable online dealer you want to amend your soil to make sure that it drains well and has high organic matter you want to test the pH make sure it's between 5.5 and 7 add lime or soil acidifier if it's not to adjust it add fertilizer then plant your strawberry plants 12 inches apart making sure that the crown is above the soil line level then you want to water you want to mulch and then you want to add label bling and that's it here's a quick tip i promised you guys in the beginning if you're anything like me i'm constantly ordering plants they're showing up on my doorstep i'm totally unprepared to do anything with them it's complete garden pandemonium i'm a totally lazy gardener i really am so this is what happened to me with these strawberries they showed up i was unprepared to do anything any of the stuff i just showed you in this video so i'm going to show you how i kept them alive while i got everything ready for the bed unwrap them and get them out of the box as soon as possible moisten them or soak them like we did earlier in the video and then put them in a planter and surround them with soil make sure the roots are in the soil make sure the crowns are above the soil you know the deal then put the planter in the soil the reason why you plant the planter is actually because it does keep the soil moist for longer keep an eye on the planter though make sure it stays moist like you would with any other container thank you guys so much for watching this video if you want to see any other videos i'm going to be making one on how to protect the strawberries from the rampaging bunnies and squirrels in my front yard and another video on the irrigation system that i'm going to set up for the whole garden so if you want to see either of those definitely subscribe and i will see you guys next time little those little shovel things yes i'm talking to myself a heck of a