Strawberry fruit is highly nutritious and delicious. The fruit has refrigerant qualities, so will cool you off on a hot summer day. Leaves are astringent and can make a nice tea.

 

With their dark green attractive foliage, pretty white flowers and bright red fruits, strawberries make one of the finest edible, ornamental groundcover plants for use in the home landscape. The day neutral  varieties also make good hanging basket or pyramidal planter plants. In the garden they should be grown in mulched raised beds. They make great companions for peach trees.

 

Do not interplant strawberries with blueberries. Strawberries and blueberries don't make good companions.

 

Originally strawberries produced a single crop of strawberries in June or July. These strawberries are now called "June bearing." Having a large crop of strawberries at one time is wonderful for freezing, making jam, or just enjoying a lot of strawberries. June bearing strawberries produce fruit buds in autumn, fruit for two to three weeks in the early summer, and then start producing runners or daughter plants.

 

In the quest for a longer fruiting season, plant breeders identified strawberries with two crops a year - one in the early summer and another in the fall. They named this growth habit "everbearing." The total harvest from everbearing strawberries is almost the same as the June bearing strawberries, but the berries tend to be smaller.

 

Seeking an even longer strawberry season, plant breeders developed the "day neutral" strawberries, which produce berries and runners throughout the growing season.

 

Once planted, strawberries are easy to care for. Mulch the plants lightly with straw or compost to retain soil moisture, keep the roots cool, and minimize weeds. Pull any weeds by hand when they emerge to minimize damage to strawberry's shallow roots.

 

Ensure that the plants receive one inch of water per week. One good soaking is more beneficial than several light waterings.

 

If you want the plants to produce more runners and stronger roots, pinch off the flowers and berries the first year for June bearing strawberries and for the first six weeks for day neutral strawberries. When the first runners appear apply a complete fertilizer suitable for acid-loving plants.

 

June bearing strawberries require annual renovation for best plant health and yield. After fruiting, cut or mow the tops off of the berries, being careful not to damage the crowns. A week or two later narrow the rows back to 8-12 inches with a rototiller or hoe. Fertilize the plants after renovation.

 

 

 

 

 

This month the Chuckster covers questions about fertilizing plants that have already been planted.

 

We need to talk about acid-loving and non-acid-loving plants separately. Let’s start with the acid-loving plants – that would be your blueberries, strawberries, cranberries, lingonberries, blackberries, raspberries, and tea camellias. We prefer organic or semi-organic fertilizers when possible, such as cottonseed meal (6-2-1) or Happy Frog (6-4-4). Another good one for acid-loving plants is coffee grounds (2-0.36-0.67).  The nursery uses Holly-tone fertilizer(5-3-4) on our acid loving plants.

 

Never use a fertilizer with high calcium content on acid-loving plants. This includes compost with eggshells, colloidal phosphate, bone meal, or agricultural limestone.  High soil calcium will cause Iron chlorosis (yellowing leaves) on blueberries and severely stunt their growth.

 

On all other plants you can use regular blended organic fertilizers, such as Plant-tone, Fertrell (5-5-3), McGeary Organics (5-3-4), or Harmony (dehydrated chicken manure). All of these are commercially available blended organic fertilizers.  Depending on your soil test results, you may need to raise (with agricultural limestone) or lower (with granular sulphur) your soil pH to meet your plants’ optimum pH requirements. 

 

Most of the soil tests I see are very low in phosphorus (P).  The best time to add phosphorus is at planting time by adding either rock phosphate or colloidal phosphate (never use this on blueberries due to its high calcium content) into the planting hole backfill soil.  We also add greensand at planting time for extra potassium and micronutrients.  See our planting instructions on the nursery website for more planting instructions.

 

Apply the first fertilizer just before the plant starts growing – late March to early April. If you missed that, it’s OK to fertilize in early May.  Make the second application around mid-late June. The fertilizer will last about six weeks.

 

Don’t fertilize heavily after early July. You need to leave plenty of time for the plant to harden off so they don’t go into fall in active growth. Too late of an application could leave the plant vulnerable to more winter damage. 

 

A December or January fertilizer application in colder areas can be beneficial in some cases.  Winter fertilization, after there is no possibility of the plant breaking dormancy will often allow plants to absorb those nutrients and produce strong spring growth.

 

Those are the NPK ratios – the relative amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in the fertilizer.

 

Nitrogen is vital for a plant’s vegetative growth. Plants deficient in nitrogen turn pale green or yellow. The demand for nitrogen is particularly strong in the early days of growing when the plant is flushing new growth.

 

Phosphorous has more to do with plants maturing than with growth. Phosphorous helps with photosynthesis and energy transfers within the plant, leading to good flower and fruit growth. It also helps with climatic stress, such as drought or cold, and strong root growth.  Phosphorous moves slowly through the soil, so for existing plants you’ll need to use a steel bar to dig 8-12” deep holes to get it down to the roots zone.  Poke these holes in a circle every two feet around the plants drip zone.  You can also add additional circles in circles two feet inside and outside the drip zone, depending on the size of the plant.  Fill the holes with a 50/50 mix of phosphate rock and compost or Michigan peat.  Plants deficient in phosphorus often respond well to an application of compost.

 

Potassium is critical for root development and cell division, it helps plants retain water, and helps with the manufacturing and movement of sugars within the plant.

 

Well-made compost is great for feeding the life of the soil. It’s high in humates and has a wide range of macro and micro nutrients in a relatively easy to absorb organic form. And with compost you don’t need to worry about burning the plant. You just need a little at any one time – a few cups to the plant for small plants, more for larger plants.  Always water in compost or fertilizer well.

 

You can also make compost tea by soaking some compost in water for 24-36 hours and then applying the liquid to the leaves. In this form, the nutrients are readily available to the plants. You can also make manure teas. With animal manures you need to be careful not to burn the plant. Green manure teas are another option – soak plants with a lot of nutrients, such as comfrey, for three days in water and then use the water as a foliar feed or soil drench. All teas are fast acting and will provide immediate benefits to plants. Solid compost is slower acting. They work together.

 

We love seaweed concentrates as a transplant dip and occasional soil drench and foliar application when plants are in active growth. The nutrients are easily absorbed into new foliage. Our favorite is Nature’s NOG, which is manufactured in Clemson, SC, based on many years of research and testing by Dr. Senn, a global pioneer in researching the horticultural uses of seaweed. It’s a combination of emulsified cold-water seaweeds and humates.  For our customers’ convenience we now sell Natures NOG.

 

Seaweed is not technically a fertilizer, it’s a plant growth enhancer. It contains many micro nutrients, as well as plant stimulating hormones that stimulate new root and shoot growth following transplanting and during growth. Seaweed and humate solutions also stimulate biological activity in the soil, help plants overcome stresses from transplanting, drought, frost, freezing, and insect and disease pressure. I wouldn’t transplant a plant without a good dose of seaweed concentrate.

 

 

In each of the pre-industrial places where the people have developed a rich tradition of local, wild, seasonal foods intertwined into their lives, they have done so by gradually honing an understanding of their wild foods and the soils and ecosystems from which they are derived.  Domestication occurred organically as they bred varieties of plants, animals and fungi to accentuate their already desirable flavors and propagation habits. Through trial and error, and simply through the need to survive healthily on the land, people learned about suites of foods, which seem to work synergistically together in ways beyond the current medical-nutritionist understandings of human health.   They invented new ways of storing and processing these foods, from the Innuits pickling fish in the ground, to Germans krauting cabbage, to the Cherokees’ pemmican super-food and the Yosemite acorn granaries.  Finally, they invented the subtly masterful cooking techniques for transforming these lovingly nurtured ingredients into foods that we travel over oceans to eat and that we sit back from with a profound sense of satisfaction and nourishment. 

 

This array of native foods, followed closely by spirituality, language and music, is the first thing I think about when I think of human diversity and ingenuity; and yet, in the southern Appalachian mountains, a major global hotspot of biodiversity and rich forest ecosystems, with scores of amazing native food plants, animals and fungi, this native cuisine we don’t have.  Sure, we have barbecued pork, venison that’s illegal to sell, and a few people still making hominy here and there.  Fry-bread and candied apples don’t qualify.  I’ve tasted some excellent muscadine and scuppernong wines.  Some people daringly eat persimmons off the ground, know what paw-paws are, and play around with black walnuts.  The native cuisine vanguard is eating sochan and basswood leaves, processing acorns, and rejoicing over the occasional tasty groundhog speared with spicebush and birch twigs and grilled over hickory coals. We have gourd banjos and rivercane baskets, Shining Rock Wilderness and the legacy of Jesse Helms, but we don’t have native cuisine.  That is, we don’t have a distinct palette of foods defining each season’s mood, foods that grow naturally here with minimal persuasion, that we prepare with the accumulated wisdom of generations of people testing what grows well, what tastes good, and what makes them feel good.  There’s no reason we shouldn’t have a Katuan cuisine. It’s more of an issue of memory and re-discovery than invention.

 

One characteristic of tourists is that they sometimes get homesick and want to eat the food from home when they go to unfamiliar places.  I met someone in NYC who said she once had H&H bagels, cream cheese and lox mailed to her in Japan because she missed the processed American food after eating only Japanese food for two years. When Europeans came to North America, we brought our religions, our weapons, our belief systems, our diseases, our clothing, and our food.  True, at that first Thanksgiving dinner, the pilgrims were thankful for their wild turkey, cranberries, corn, and squash, but as soon as they got on their feet it was back to wheat, pigs, cabbage and apples, and here we are.  Until we learn to eat the food from the land where we live so that we love it and miss it when we’re gone, we’re all tourists in this place we call home.