The Cooldown

That was different… I thought it was supposed to be warm down here in North Carolina! Normally the strawberries don’t need to be covered until late January or early February when the weather gets consistently cold. It is actually good for strawberries to get some cold weather about this time of the year. Once it gets down into the mid to upper 30s for a couple nights, it causes the strawberries to go into dormancy and gain some winter hardiness to survive the cold upcoming months.

When the temperature goes from the 40s and 50s to suddenly into the teens, we have some issues… Dormant strawberry plants that are not producing can survive down into the 20s. When it starts to drop below that, just like us, they need to be covered up.

Now, covering an entire field of strawberries is no small task. Once the cold weather comes in permanently at the end of the month, we get all of the covers out of storage and put them in the field. They stay rolled up in the rows until it gets cold enough that we need them. Then we unroll them and pull them over the strawberries. It takes our entire farm crew to do it; they are quite large.

Since this little blast of cold came so unexpectedly, we didn’t even have the covers in the field! We had to work like crazy but we got them on just in time. Definitely got my workout in for the week. The strawberries should be fine for the spring. The spinach and bok choi aren’t huge fans of the super cold temperatures either so we threw some covers on them as well. Like anything in life, there is no guarantee. All you can do it be as prepared as possible and hope for the best.

Nice, chilly way to start the new year.