Seeing Red

Monday, Monday, Monday! That’s the big day when our strawberries come in and we can start planting! We get our strawberries as young plants called plugs. They kind of look like a chunk of dirt with some leaves sticking out of it. Not really too impressive…

We order our strawberries from a grower in the summer and they are grown especially for us. Isn’t that special! It’s a good idea to order strawberries from an established grower. If they aren’t grown in just the right environment, which takes very careful babysitting, they could not produce as much or worse, could develop diseases later on.

Disease is a huge issue when it comes to strawberries. They can develop at just about every stage of the plant’s life. If disease is contracted in the earlier stages of growth, it might not even show up until they are planted in your field and sometimes even until they are producing, or not… Once disease gets into your field it is nearly impossible to get rid of. It can even stay in the field and soil over seasons! Really not something you want to happen… Always make sure your plants come from a reputable source.

Once we get our plants (Monday!) we will start to transplant them into our field. The plastic is laid and the irrigation has been running. We have a tractor attachment, called a transplanter (not very original), that has a wheel with two spikes spaced a foot apart.

It rolls over top of the plastic and punches the holes to put the strawberries in. Two people sit on the back of the transplanter and feed the plugs into little cups which are then stuck in the ground.

It’s a little hard to describe just through writing. If you would like to see this fascinating process just click here to watch a video we took back in the 2013 season! It takes some quick hands and a lot of hours. This year we have over 40,000 plants to put in the ground!

Coming up this year, in addition to our three usual varieties of strawberries that we all know and love (Sweet Charlie, Camarosa, and the ever-popular Chandler), we are trying out a brand new variety called Ruby June! They are supposed to be real dark, real sweet, and real early to produce. That’s a combination we just have to try out for ourselves!

Once all the berries are nice and comfortable in their new home they will put down some roots and hunker down for the cold. Don’t worry, we will give them blankets to cover up. They stay dormant throughout the winter until warm spring weather wakes them up and they start to bloom. Then the picking begins!