Strawberry Growing Masterclass: My Top Tips for Huge Harvests

I challenge you to find a strawberry that tastes anywhere near as good as one you've grown yourself. In fact, I'll let you into a little secret... you can't! Strawberries can be grown just about anywhere, in the ground, in pots, and dangling down seductively from hanging baskets, and with a few tips of the trade they're super easy too. If you want to grow perfect, sweet, juicy, aromatic strawberries every time, you've come to the right place. Welcome to our strawberry growing masterclass. Look at these little beauties! We're going to get these planted in a moment, but first let's just take a look at the different types of strawberries you can grow. I want to be sure I can pick strawberries for as long as possible, and that means growing a selection of varieties that together will crop over an extended period. Now for this purpose, strawberries are divided into three main types. Summer fruiting or June bearing strawberries tend to produce their fruits all in one go over a period of about two to three weeks. Now within this group they're divided into early, mid, and late season fruiting strawberries, which will crop any time from early summer to late summer, and even spring if you're in a warmer climate. Then there are our ever-bearers, also known as perpetual or all-season strawberries. These guys tend to crop on and off throughout the summer and even into early autumn. If you're after a steady supply of strawberries to pick, kind of as and when, then this might be the choice for you. If on the other hand you're after lots of strawberries all at once for making, say, jams, then those June bearers or summer fruiting strawberries would be more your thing. Closely related to the ever-bearers are day-neutral strawberries, so-called because they aren't affected by day length. These will produce their tempting berries throughout the growing season in a small but steady supply. Separate from all of the above, kind of in a little world of their own, are the alpine and wild strawberries. I've got them here growing out of the cracks in this stone wall. Now these have a really, really intense flavor, although the berries are very small, but they're perfect dainty berries for topping, say, your porridge. Now as the name implies, these are very easy to look after than the larger strawberry plants, and they'll grow just about anywhere as a beautiful edging plant, or as here, growing out the cracks of your wall. Some strawberry varieties have an incredible resistance to pests and diseases, or an award-winning reliability, quite literally earning themselves either an All-America Selection or a Royal Horticultural Society Award of Garden Merit. If you're new to strawberry growing or are just bewildered by the sheer number of varieties out there promising all sorts of benefits, well then, these might not be a bad place to start. And here's that same list ordered according to ripening period. Pick one or two from each column and you'll have yourself the perfect all-season selection. Strawberries will grow just about anywhere, but you'll get the best results, meaning sweeter, more fragrant fruits, and more of them if you aim for a minimum of six hours of sunshine, or eight or more if you're aiming for perfection. I'm going to be turning over one of my beds to strawberries, and just to help things get off to a raring start, I'm popping in a couple of buckets of really well-rotted manure. Now you could just use garden compost, something like that, for a bit of extra organic goodness. And then for good measure, just a handful of blood fish and bone. Now this is a balanced organic fertilizer. If you're looking for something vegan, there are kind of labeled brand alternatives available, just look for something that's balanced and of course organic. And I'm just going to fork this in so Rosie doesn't start munching at it, because you're a bit of a mischief sometimes aren't you with this stuff? And here are our plants. Now these are potted strawberries, but you can also find bare root strawberries also sold as runners. Now these offer really excellent value for money. They look pretty shocking though, with next to no leaves and really rather scraggly affairs, but don't let that put you off. Once you get them into the soil, they'll be well away. Many commercial growers plant their strawberries through black plastic. This helps to warm the soil early in the season, it retains moisture, suppresses weeds, and it keeps the strawberries off the muddy soil. You can mimic this at home by using an old compost or potting mix sacks like this. Just open them out along the seams and then have the black side facing up, and then secure it in at the side, tucking it in and using pins to hold it all in place. And then to plant, all you have to do is cut a slit, an x-shaped slit like this, and then fold back the flaps like that, pop your strawberry plant in, and then fold it back neatly around the plant. I'm not that keen on using plastic directly on the soil for prolonged periods of time, and besides slugs can potentially lurk underneath, so a plastic-free alternative is to use strawberry mats made from natural materials like coir or coconut fibre, but just make sure they are wide enough to cover the entire width of the plant. Believe it or not, some aren't. They can be on the pricey side though, so an excellent alternative is to use the strawberry's namesake, straw, and I just think that looks a lot more attractive too. There's room in this bed for around six plants, which leaves about 45 centimetres or 18 inches between plants in each direction. Now getting the right depth is important, and that's very easy for container-grown strawberry plants like this, because they're planted at the same depth as they were in in their nursery pot like that, but for bare root plants we need to be a little more careful. For bare root plants it's really important to make sure you don't plant them too deep or too shallow. Too deep and the plant could potentially just rot away, and too shallow and it'll wave about in the wind and dry out really easy, creating a brittle and weak plant. You want to plant it so that the crown, that's where the leaves emerge, sits ever so slightly proud of the soil like this. These plants are going in right next to my bed of garlic over there, and would you believe it, garlic is the perfect companion plant to strawberries. It doesn't just keep vampires away, it helps to deter many pests such as spider mites. Now you might find our garden planner useful for this very purpose. If you select the plant that you're interested in and click the companion planting button, it will suggest perfect companions for that crop. As these plants are going to remain relatively small in this first season, I'm going to interplant them with even more garlic. Now this lot was started off in the greenhouse in the autumn, but they're big enough to plant outside now, so let's get them in between. Wonderful stuff! I'll add the straw around these plants later on in spring once they've grown on a bit and are starting to flower, that way I won't smother them. With their compact habit and quick cropping, strawberries make an excellent choice for container growing, meaning that anyone can grow them. I've grown them very successfully in wide shallow containers, and I've also tried them in hanging baskets where the fruits hang down, inviting you to pick them. Now you can sometimes grow them in strawberry planters like this, but I'm not so keen on them. I'm finding that when I water, the compost or potting mix just kind of gets blasted out, exposing the strawberry like this, so it sort of rocks about and dries out even quicker. For this reason I'd avoid these or choose strawberry planters with cupped planting pockets, or perhaps a strawberry tower. I'm going to put together a strawberry cascade instead, just maybe there Rosie, and it uses three pots of progressively smaller size. And to fill it I'm going to use a potting mix that's an all-purpose potting mix that's been split 50-50 with a soil-based potting mix, and that will just give it a bit of body and help it to stop slumping down so much. So to start I'm just going to half fill the largest container with our potting mix. There we go, and now for our second pot, and just so we get everything nice and central, I'm going to stick in this bamboo cane just while we set things up, and then slide the pot down like that through its central drainage point, and that'll mean just keep it kind of neat while we're filling it. And let's half fill this one, and then our final pot. Slide it on, there we are, and I'm going to fill this one mostly to the top. And now planting time. I'm going to plant three in the bottom tier, two in the middle tier, and one in the top. We've got a nice three-tiered effect now. Might need to just kind of split it apart a bit like that, the roots just to kind of slide it in. Now obviously we're planting a lot closer than we did in the ground over there, but that's absolutely fine because in containers they can be planted a little bit closer like this. Ah, it's a little c-shaped grub which is a telltale sign of vine weevil. That is a real pest problem of potted plants, so if you find them just remove them and well, get rid of them and hopefully it won't cause any damage. Right, and then two plants for our middle tier here, and then finally one plant right here in the top. There we go, that looks all right doesn't it? It doesn't look like much now, but these plants will soon bulk out and by summer they'll be cropping and should create a really beautiful visual effect. Now growing strawberries like this will raise them up off the ground so the strawberries themselves are much less likely to get muddy, and they'll get a lot less attention from slugs as well. Now you could take the same concept and use, for example, colorful buckets, anything that graduates in size and where you can make drainage holes in the bottom. The great tip with strawberries is to keep them well watered while they are establishing and during dry weather, and that is especially important for container plants because obviously they won't be able to get their roots down into the native soil down below. Once the plants are a bit bigger and starting to fruit, do try and aim your water at the base of plants so you're not wetting the fruits, which might lead to problems like sort of mold on them. Once my strawberry plants start to flower I will water them with a high potassium liquid tomato feed which will help to encourage those fruits to swell into their gorgeousness, and then early in spring I will tickle in a general purpose organic fertilizer just to help power plants up for the coming growing season. Do take the time to mulch around your strawberry plants. As I said, I will be using straw and putting it around once the plants have grown on a bit. The straw will really help to keep those fruits nice and blemished free, then it will be removed at the end of the season so I can go in and tidy up the old plants by cutting away all the old foliage and dead leaves and so on so they can sit nicely over the winter. Now if you haven't got straw, you could use something like dry grass clippings. Watch out for birds. Netting is one option to keep them physically off your ripening fruits, but just make sure it's in place before the fruits start to really color up. Another, some might say genius alternative, is to paint strawberry sized rocks a bright red color and then nestle these in amongst your plants and in the lead up to fruit ripening time. Now the theory is that birds will come down, peck at the strawberries, find it's rock hard and get a rude awakening, and then disappear and not return. Has anyone tried this? Let me know in the comments. Another idea to keep the birds off is to just feed the fruits in here as they're just about to start ripening up to protect them from those birds, and have it in such a way that the rain can't get in. This will also create a nice warm microclimate for those fruits to ripen in. The other pest to watch out for is slugs. Now if the hole in a strawberry has kind of got sharpish angles, that's likely to be a bird pecking at it, but if the hole's slightly rounded that's more likely to be slugs. So to control them, set up beer traps as your fruits start to turn a pinkish color, and keep the beer topped up and empty regularly. Slugs are especially a problem in wetter climates, which is why it's not a good idea to put your mulch down too early. Now sometimes you'll see a hole with pill bugs or wood lice in them. They haven't created the hole, the slugs have, and then the wood lice or pill bugs are taking advantage of the opportunity created for them. So take care of the slugs and then they won't make an appearance. Now for more tips on organic, natural slug control, do check out our video on that which I've linked to down in the description. Also watch out early in the season for sudden frosty weather when your plants are flowering. Now strawberries are super hardy, but the flowers themselves can turn to a blackened mush if they get a hard frost. So if it's going to be a bit chilly, just cover them over with something nice and warming like this nice thick fleecy row cover for example. The real joy of growing your own strawberries is that you can pick them at the absolute peak of perfection. Never again will you have to put up with hard insipid fruits like these, you know the ones with these nasty band of white where it hasn't fully ripened. These are a thing of history. Pick strawberries in the warmth of the afternoon sun if you can for that really developed aroma. Now strawberries will store really well in the fridge, but the cold does knock back the flavor a bit, so bring them out to warm up before you eat them. Strawberries produce lots of thin wiry stems called runners, and we can use these to our advantage to grow more strawberry plants. Now this is very simple, it's just a question of pinning them down into the soil or a pot, a potting mix, and then once they've rooted you can cut them free from the mother plant. Now that's what I've been doing here, and I'm going to have a few more strawberry plants as a result. Producing more strawberries like this is really simple to do and incredibly satisfying. Do check out our video on that. Unless you're actively wanting to grow more plants, then I would suggest removing those runners because that'll concentrate the plant's energy into bulking itself out, and of course producing those luscious fruits. And I would say don't let any runners form in at least the first season for this reason. That all said, as plants become older they do become less productive, so using runners is a great way to replace them. Strawberries are also quite easy to start from seeds. Look at these guys here. These were sowed about a month ago and then grown on under grow lights to bring them on a bit, and then after I pricked them out into their own plug trays they've come out here and they're growing along really nicely. I think I surprised myself actually with just how quick and easy they were to grow. Now these are of an ever-bearing or perpetual variety, but I figured I might sow myself some alpine strawberries which I can then use as edging to my flower beds. So I've got my pot here of just sieved seed starting mix, and I'm just going to scatter the seeds very finely over the top like that. There we are, and there's no need to cover them because they need light to germinate. And then to water them I'm going to use this pump action mist sprayer here, and that will avoid disturbing the seeds. If you haven't got one of these and maybe water the potting mix before sowing your seeds so you don't sort of dislodge them. There we go. Now this is going to go inside into the warm to germinate, then once the seedlings are up they will go into their own plugs or pots and they'll be safe to come back out here as well. I'll then grow them on and then plant them out in spring. While we're here, by the way, let me just show you these plants here that I potted up and brought here about a week ago. Now this is called forcing because I'm bringing on an extra, extra early harvest by just adding a little bit of extra warmth courtesy of the greenhouse here. These will fruit at least two weeks and as much as four weeks earlier than strawberries outside. Then once they have finished fruiting, I'll plant them back outside where they will have that much more legroom and will be easier to look after. Do check out this video next to get the lowdown on growing more strawberries and share your tips for growing the best straws. I'll catch you next time!