Strawberry Crowns (Farm12 2/22/22) Ended

That looks fabulous!

Day 34. Strawberries seem to like having a weekly R&R!  There are a lot of strawberries developing, and the roots still look healthy (mostly white or light brown).

Burpee says to leave a few runners on the plants; AG says to remove the runners.  Does anyone know which is right?

For now I'm removing the runners, because I'm not going to save the plants for another season, and I won't be transplanting them outdoors.  

Look at that strawberry ripening.  Beautiful.

Day 36. One ripe strawberry!



It tasted like a juicy strawberry, but probably would have been sweeter if given another day or two before harvesting. I counted at least 27 more developing strawberries on the 12 crowns!

lynnee, it is HUGE! And so beautiful, it almost doesn't look real! 

Day 40. Today I harvested 6 ripe strawberries (one from the Kratky), and they tasted good but not as sweet as I'd hoped for. The one from the Kratky was the sweetest, and almost perfect.



Kratky strawberry is on the left. The other harvested strawberries were comparable in size to these.



Now that I have healthy Albion strawberry plants growing, it's time to figure out what the optimal nutrition should be. From these two web sites, I've learned that sweetness depends more on the plant variety than anything else, so nutrition is key to improving flavor, I think.  

strawberryplants.org/
www.yara.us/crop-nutrition/strawberry/nutrient-deficiencies/

The Yara photos make it clear that the new leaf sets that are coming in with burned leaf tips are signaling a calcium deficiency (add more CalMag, maybe). The brown leaf edges (which one AG growing guide says is normal for strawberries) is a potassium deficiency (add more AG nutes, maybe).

Something else that I've learned is that strawberries really like having a weekly R&R. Probably it's because adding fresh plant food weekly corrects the above deficiencies.

Strawberries also benefit from some pH testing and correction. The water in my AG gets too acidic if I don't watch it. When the pH is low, the plants have difficulty taking up calcium, so that probably explains why the plants show calcium deficiency despite receiving some CalMag already.

The Albion is an "everbearing" variety that is supposed to continuously produce fruit over a summer growing season.

Kratky definitely grows on you! I can't believe that the strawberry crown survived, let alone that it is producing fruit. It even has unhealthy-looking roots.

It has received extra R&Rs, because I wasn't sure about how much AG nutrient to add to 1 pint of water. It seems to be happy with 1.5 ml, along with weekly/biweekly rinses.

Day 44. The strawberries are continuing to ripen. No new blooms, so I need to read up on when to expect more from an "everbearing" variety like the Albion.

In growing strawberries, I now think it's very important to maintain the pH in the "golden" 5.5-6.5 range. The water in the Farm 12 Plus gets acidic (pink to red) if I do nothing--probably that would be mitigated by connecting the garden to an Aerovoir so that 7.0 pH tap water would be feeding in all the time.

The photo below shows a new leaf set (at left) that appeared AFTER I started monitoring the pH closely to forestall a calcium deficiency. The set at right shows what happens when the plant can't take up the available calcium due to low pH--leaf sets are stunted and don't open right. The partly opened set in the middle (arrow) got adequate calcium for most of the time when it was developing, so only the leading edge of one of the three leaves is brown.



The strawberries today (4/7/22) in the Farm Plus and the Kratky.

My mouth is watering for strawberries now.