Growing Strawberries

Hi there! Winter is now over and the spring has arrived with all its beauty and freshness. This means doing a lot of chores, however. The trees must be pruned, seeds must be planted, the garden must be cleaned and much more. Among this years' chores, I've decided to plant strawberries. I had many unsuccessful attempts in the past (well except for one year, for which I've attached pictures below). For some reasons, the strawberries that I planted earlier did not produce the lush green leaves and strong roots, which are critical for a bountiful harvest.

Strawberries I managed to grow in 2016. This picture was taken on April 23rd.

Such lush foliage is an indicator of strong roots, which in turn yield an excellent harvest:

Strawberries harvested from the above patch.

However, this patch somehow did not thrive in the following years. Later I planted strawberries (including the same variety and others) to various different spots in our garden. Somehow, none of them were as successful as the ones that I showed above.

This year, I built another raised bed just for strawberries and decided to use a strawberry cover for many of its claimed benefits. As for soil, I used a rich mixture of peat moss and perlite mixed with good quality organically fertilized soil. I planted strawberries of 4 different varieties:

• Albino (bottom-left in the pic below)
• Rubygem (bottom-right)
• Ivy (top-right, pretty sure this is not the official name)
• Sweet Charlie (top-left)

Recently planted strawberries on 6th March, 2019

If you think that these don't look like strawberries, you are not alone. They were simply bare roots. Here is another picture about 20 days after the planting (now they start to look like something):

Strawberries as of 28th March, 2019

The following picture is from April 17th. They are now looking much better. They seem to have a slow but steady growth:

I've noticed that some of them were producing flowers. But I know from experience that if you let small plants produce flowers and/or runners, their foliage development gets hampered. And with that they fail to produce good fruits. So I try to be on top of pinching any flower and runner that they develop until they develop strong foliage.

Edit (5/5/19): Here is another recent update from our strawberry patch (As you can see in the picture I've also installed a drip irrigation system)

I will keep this post updated to let you know of the progress over the season. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section.

Edit (10/06/19): We just returned back home from a 9 days vacation, and this is what I have found:

The plants have grown vigorously and produced amazing tasting strawberries. I am still so excited to make a distinction between the four varieties that I mentioned earlier. So far they all seem to taste great. Just to highlight the difference between how they looked upon first planting on March 6th and now, I want to show you the pictures side-by-side:

Recently planted strawberries on 6th March, 2019

The same bed three months later

To conclude this post, I can say that growing strawberries in a raised bed with a strawberry cover makes a big difference. I've tried growing strawberries in the past but could never achieve this level of quality. As for the growing location, I've planted the strawberries on the northern side of our house (the same side where I grow greens such as lettuce). But I think they still receive sufficient sunlight. They start to receive direct light as of 1pm and continue to receive it until the evening hours.