Strawberry season

An entire post about strawberries? Watch me 😊

Initially, I didn't plan to talk a lot about my strawberries, but I was so surprised when I came to the garden today that I decided I had to share it with you. It's been rainy and cold for the last four days, so I didn't go to the garden, and I didn't expect to see so many ripe strawberries after such a cold weather. My brother in law is getting married on Friday. I'm leaving tomorrow early in the morning and will be back only on Sunday, so I went to the garden to see if anything urgent needed to be done and then I saw them. Well, these babies should receive a lot of attention...

I know that many gardeners consider growing strawberries scary as so many things can go wrong and all their effort could be for nothing. I didn't want to go through all the trouble because of a few strawberries, so I have never planted them before. My lovely neighbour has been asking me for years to take some of her offshoot plants and give growing strawberries a go. I kept resisting, but she can be very persuasive, so I caved in last autumn.

I prepared a bed at the border of the garden where I had potatoes before as she told me that potatoes make good soil for strawberries. I planted more than 30 plants and kept watering them every day for a couple of weeks before forgetting about them completely. As I said last time, I was really surprised that every single plant survived winter even though I didn't cover them - hard little things.

I loosened the soil and removed the weeds way too late, and hoped for the best. The plants are not very big, but they are loaded with strawberries.

It all starts with tender white blossom waiting for pollinators. I have plenty of insects as my garden is full of beneficial plants, so I kept being positive.

After a couple of week I started to see fruits. At this stage I placed a lot of straw under the plants which has multiple benefits. It helps to retain water, so that I don't have to water the plants every day. The fruit doesn't touch the soil which prevents them from rotting. It also helps keeping them clean.

One plant got attacked by ants, and I let the nature take its own course and now they are gone. I have no idea what happened, but there are no ants to be seen. Great!

Once they start turning pink it goes very fast. There are so many strawberries ripening at the moment and I hope that they will not rot before I get to them on Monday.

This gives me so much joy! When I was a child I had to garden every single day and I hated it. It was so much work and I couldn't play with my friends. These days I appreciate it so much. It's the best kind of therapy for me.

I pick the red ones in hope that it will push the plants to produce more...

This one is so big! Of course, I sent all these photos to my husband to make him a little bit jealous as he is travelling at the moment.

And yes, I had to taste them and in the end ate all of them in the garden...

They have already started to make offshoots, so there will be new plants in the autumn for next year. And I'm sure that my lovely neighbour will give me even more. Now, when I know how to grow them I'm planning to cover my entire garden in strawberries 😊

I also have tons of wild/forest strawberries. This is an entirely different story as they grow like weed. You don't need to do anything and they keep spreading and covering the area that I designated for them. I must admit that I prefer them to the garden strawberries, but they are just so tiny that I never have enough.