How to Plant & Grow Healthy Organic Strawberries for food from Plugs/Roots No Till Raised Bed Garden

Hello this is Mark from I Am Organic Gardening and today we're going to be planting up strawberries. I'm going to show you how to plant up strawberries that will produce and last forever. So I received this shipment the other day. These are strawberry plugs. They're grown originally from seeds that were started in a greenhouse, a certified organic greenhouse, over 15 weeks ago and has been monitored and recorded through the USDA to make sure that everything's correct. I'm a certified organic grower so I have to use certified organic products when I plant them up. So let's take a look. So inside the box contains two trays or two flats. Each flat has 125 plants each on it and there's two different varieties. Here's our first one and here's our second one. So here's a better picture of the plug that they sent me and you can see that there's three plants in here. Now what's nice is when this is grown from seed here this is going to be your crown in the future right here from my fingertip up and that's if you planted bare root strawberries you would plant it from the same just the same way it's growing here you would plant it from the crowned up. You just have that crown pretty much at soil level because if you plant that crown too much below soil level the plant will not do well and we want those strawberry plants to last forever. Now just like every other strawberry plant out there these plants will eventually die off but they'll be sending runners out they'll re-root in the ground so I want that raised bed of mine to be healthy and growing soil all the time. So here's my raised bed they're seven feet wide and 80 feet long. Now I chose to make them this wide because I want them to continue to grow and reproduce themselves and I'm not limited on space. If you have a smaller area then you're limited on space but you can still do the same thing. It's amount of spacing that's going to help you in the future if you don't plant it too densely to begin with. So by building this curtain raised bed in front of me which I just did about three weeks ago before we got a winter storm in again I have injured the soil so I want it to come alive again so I'm going to add those three different types of seeds and I'll show you that right now. So here we have the three types of seeds I'm going to be using for my living cover that's going to be growing my soil along with the strawberry plants. We have New Zealand white clover and that produces one taproot that can go down 40 inches into the soil and we're going to use 80 percent of this in our mix. Next is summer alfalfa that has many taproots that can go four to six feet deep into the soil but again please check your planting zone your area if you can use this and we're only going to use 10 percent of that in the mix and the last is our ryegrass sometimes they call it annual ryegrass and those roots can go anywhere from two to seven feet down on the soil but have lots of very fine roots that can spread out and aerate that soil and grow soil for us. Follow the instructions on the bag how deep to plant them. Now when we plant our strawberry plants in with this everything grows as one solid green mat. Now the ones in the back they will grow a foot tall but they will not shade out your strawberry plants for the simple reason is most of this has very weak stems and will fall down. The strawberry plants will be strong enough and come to the surface. Now with all this living green you have a mat where the blue mat is here you have this mat of green so when the strawberries grow which is nice and red is going to stand out so you can see them they're not going to be hitting the soil and they're going to be sitting on top of that green mat here just like in nature. Now if you're concerned about weeds growing in here in the beginning there might be but as soon as this takes over there's going to be less and less weeds over the years. Now what's nice about this with all this living covering here you're bringing in nature's predators and what they do if there's weed seeds that come in there they eat the weed seeds the predators meaning the ladybugs and all the bugs that you see in the soil they will devour those weed seeds. So just like in nature it's what it's doing is capturing sunlight. Sunlight is going down through the plant and now that plant is going to exude sugars and proteins feeding the soil and microorganisms and also that sunlight is going to be brought down feeding the soil liquid carbon. So let's go over some of the basics that our strawberry plants need. First we'll start off with sunlight. Now they need anywhere from six to ten hours a day. Number two is watering. Watering they need at least one to two inches of rain a week or watering. Now since we're going to be growing soil we don't have to use as much water as somebody that uses a raised bed that's just formed with none of these other things growing in there. You'll see a lot of farmers grow these with black plastic and they have to water a lot and a lot and a lot but with all this going on that's going to be retaining our water in the ground because we're going to be growing roots in the soil opening up those pores and able to store more water in the soil. Now when it comes to pH everybody is concerned about that. I've never checked it on my own farm. It's a preference but I'm learning over my research and over time on my farm I've never added anything. I don't believe in adding lime but what I'm finding out is that the soil pH is controlled by the plant using all that soil food web right next to the root. So if you test out here it's going to be different from there and you have to test right next to that root because the plant is going to control its own pH not all the way out here but right next to the plant because that's where it needs it the most. It's not concerned out here and even if the roots are out here they're going to be concerned more about the main roots around the main plant. Spacing of the plants depends on your goal. If you want a lot of product in a very small space you should have you should plant your strawberries at least a minimum of a foot apart. Now they say you should do that in rows but in this raised bed since you can access it easily you can go a foot on center with the strawberry plants. Now I'm going to go a lot further apart because I have the room. So I lightly rake the surface apply those seeds and now I'm going to plant my strawberry plugs. So planting of a plug or bare root because this is the top of the crown you want it even with the surface is so simple because basically it's just a simple pulling back of the soil placing it in pushing it to one side firmly and then pushing the soil back around it and then when you go back you just want to look that the crown or the plug surface is even with the surface of the soil that's around it. Then after we're done with this we should water them in and then it's going to soak down. So if you have a chance go back in the next several days and make sure that it didn't sink down the soil too far. If you want to you can pull it back up again it's not going to hurt it it hasn't rooted completely yet in the ground. So here's the beginning of my raised bed as you can see they're not evenly spaced but the best thing about strawberries you don't have to make it a science to get it every single one a square foot apart because they are going to send out runners some are going to die off but hopefully not but they are going to spread so it doesn't matter what pattern you have I kind of did a zigzag pattern or you can do a straight line whatever it is they all are going to mature and spread out across the top of the surface. I want to thank you very much for watching this video today and taking time out of your day to do so I'm going to finish up it's getting very cloudy we're expected at least an inch inch and a half of rain in the next several hours so I'm going to try to get everything planted and I'll see you shortly. Thanks!