Growing Strawberries
The first few years of living in Portugal I did not do very well at growing strawberries. There were not very many and it was not a very long season. Now there are masses of them, every day, every year, and the last few years the season has lasted for almost 6 months.
This is what I do to help with strawberry abundance…
- Whenever I have purchased strawberry plants, they have always been the bare root one’s and not the full plant in a pot.
- I plant them quite close together, they create their own shade then, which helps them not to dry out (and then I only need to water them every other day even in the intense heat here).
- I try to give them some shade for the midday sun. They love sun but the midday sun can be a bit much for them.
- I use the bark of the pine (or pine needles work too, or plant them under a pine or oak tree) and I put this down around the strawberries. They love the acidity, and it stops the berries from being on the ground and stops a lot of the bugs that like to eat the berries too.
- At the end of the season, I cut the whole lot back to ground level, so they hibernate for the winter.
Did you also know you can eat the leaves and the green tops of the strawberries too?
If you want to enjoy fruit, then homegrown seasonal berries really are the way to go. They are low in sugars, high in taste, full of nutrients and if homegrown not sprayed with rubbish. Unfortunately, even the ‘organic’ supermarket strawberries have an insane amount of chemicals on them.
PS: Chickens love berries too!!
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