In our journey toward having a hobby farm we decided that plants would be easier than animals. Besides laying hens (which we don’t consider hard animals to raise) and the blueberries we already mentioned we also planted some strawberries.

We eat strawberries almost every morning. We make a very nice breakfast smoothie out of frozen strawberries, yogurt and juice. It’s quite delicious so it made sense to add some strawberries to our little farm.There are two types of strawberries: June-bearers and Ever-bearers. The ever-bearers make throughout the year while the June-bearers make a large crop all at once sometime around June (duh!). Since we are going to be freezing our fruit for future use we wanted to harvest it all at once so we picked a June-bearer. The particular variety is called ‘Jewel’. This variety is supposed to have a great flavor and tolerate freezing very well.

We have started with 25 plants which isn’t a lot but it’s enough for testing the waters. If it goes well we can expand next year. I went with a bed setup as opposed to some of the other ideas. This was mainly precipitated by the location we wanted to plant them in.

Strawberries are a cheap plant to purchase and they put out runners to spread so it’s easy to aquire more plants for the next year.

Posted on February 2nd, 2008 by John
Filed under: Country Life