alan8 I'll be growing strawberries this Spring for the first time, myself, so I don't know a lot about it yet. But my immediate thought about the black plastic was what will you do with the runners? I've seen some people say they put out pots in the strawberry bed with growing soil in them and root the runners in them. Then they cut them from the mother plant. Maybe that's a possibility if you use black plastic. The site below discusses raising strawberries with black plastic and irrigation, but the discussion doesn't mention runners, just says that the plants are cut back to the crowns after the June harvest. ....this system also allows plants to be harvested for 2 to 3 years before production begins to drop off rather than replacing them each year as is the current practice. This lets you recover some of the increased costs," he said. To keep the plants producing for several years, they are cut back to the crowns right after harvesting ends in June. Not having to plug new plants each year offsets some of the increased labor required to put in this system, Erb pointed out. Keeping the plants in production this way usually causes yield to increase but fruit size to drop. However, the reduction in size does not seem to be large enough to warrant re-establishing the beds every year. I think I'd want to capture some runners to replace the mother plants before they ran out of steam in a couple of years though. As for the holes, most people don't make holes to set plants through black plastic. If you cut an X where you want to set each plant and just temporarily fold back the four points to set them in place, you won't have holes or big gaps around the plants. Just make sure you have irrigation under the plastic. Anyway, those with strawberry experience will be able to add to this discussion and give you more information than I can. It will benefit me, too. Here is a link that might be useful: Midwest Strawberry Production Adapts to Plastic and Drip Tape System

Fifty years ago strawberry commercial growers would lease the land, because every four years they would move to new land to get away from root disease. Then they found they could sterilize the soil with a powerful fumigant and replant in the same ground. The chemical used has now been banned. For the home gardener solarization is the best solution, but it takes up to six weeks in the heat of summer, which means no strawberries for that year. Al

Leaving soil exposed to the elements during the winter causes quite a few problems in fact. First, erosion due to the melting snow and/or heavy fall and spring rains. The surface 2-4 inches of your soil contains the majority of the nutrients that a plant is able to access. Once that gets washed away, you are left with various degrees of subsoils. Secondly, the constant freezing and thawing experienced in the shoulders of winter (i.e. early winter, early spring) will cause a great deal of compaction. This will eliminate all of the work you did trying to get that soil nice and fluffy. Third, in the late fall a great deal of soil organisms and microbes (including most significantly worms) can get caught in an early, heavy freeze. Without some form of insulation on the surface, they will die quickly before being able to burrow further into the soil. Now you may say "so what, there's lots of them", but if the weather warms up after a freeze, the same thing is going to happen again, and again. The bottom line is that there are only so many worms in the soil. Plastic mulches may assist in the first point about erosion, but it provides very little insulation against harsh weather. During the dead of winter, with or without a snow cover, it doesn't really matter: things are going to be frozen solid. It is the ability of a thick covering mulch to moderate the freezing and thawing during the shoulder seasons that is important.

Now, I wanted to talk about temperature for the Strawberry Winter Trials. It is something I thought a lot about before deciding I had a chance. The question was basically, "How far north can we go and successfully have an expectation of reasonable production of strawberries in an outdoor hydroponic system?" But that became more complicated than just drawing USDA zone lines, and I settled for, Will it work on coastal NE FL? To answer that, first had to understand the needs of strawberry plants... Generally it is 50 F - 80 F, with cool nights being ok...but what happens if the res gets near freezing? Nope, no problem a heater wouldn't solve in the reservoir. The problem is keeping enough photosynthesis going. There is a commercial strawberry industry in Florida, which is centered on Plant City, southern zone 9b and even spilling into zone 10. I'm barely 9a and can ride a bicycle to zone 8b at my leisure. So - I thought better just compare what the commercial industry has with what's here: The result: They are several degrees warmer for their average mid winter temperatures, but if I look at their records, we have a lower variability, actually when looking at record lows, we haven't gotten as low. That's good. The only significant risk was actually the average highs from the end of December to the first week of February. They run about 8-10 degrees warmer, 62 vs. 72 F or so. Now I can see where they get that spurt of winter growth to beat out the California crop - an Ah Ha! moment, since California is generally milder, but at a higher latitude. It fits together. So the question will be whether my mid Dec to mid Jan temperatures is warm enough to keep it going, and maybe I'll just be delayed a month in sync with California (and Maybe I should have chosen the 'Chandler' variety). This is a good bet though - since their extreme temperatures fall reasonably within my weather. But Brunswick Georgia is about as far as I would be enthusiastic. Yes. I should have chosen 'Chandler'. However, 'Sweet Charlie' is a proud Gator (Univ. FL) may have some ability to resist Florida pests and humidity, unlike 'Chandler' which is a California variety, and possibly the most succulent. Here is the temperature profile comparing prime 'Chandler' country in Saticoy, CA vs. NE FL, with the same color scheme as the previous graph where Saticoy's data and colors replace Plant City, FL. You can see where that California mildness comes in, but my area is closer to Saticoy through the early Spring than it is to Plant City Florida. NE FL and Saticoy lows are similar and Saticoy is right between Plant City and NE FL, if not somewhat closer to NE FL regarding the average daily highs through the crucial January stretch for the Valentine's Day strawberry race. However, cloud behaving, NE FL gets more vital Sun than Saticoy, and NE FL has a better December to make Saticoy its (our) winter/early spring California counterpart and competitor if there could be one: By June, you can see our average highs go towards 90 F while Saticoy's stick around 80 F for the Summer. That's why they can have nearly year round production, and we can't as the pathogens go wild and the plants can't hold up well at those temperatures and humidity. In Florida strawberries are treated as annuals and planted around October 1 in general, and finish off around June. These are generally short-day varieties to insure genetics for enough Sun to support fruiting. Other types of strawberries require long day length. The whole reason the Florida industry is competitive is due to getting berries out one month earlier before Valentine’s Day, before California is fully online. Unfortunately for Florida, imported Mexican Strawberries from places like Michoacan are starting to spoil the tiny window of opportunity, thanks to stores like Walmart’s shrewd encouragement, Florida's 10,000 strawberry farmed acres fell for the first time last year after being a poster child of modern farming success and has a gloomy projection. Meanwhile, in the last 15 years, Michoacan has essentially gone from nothing exported to offer to increasing acreage to over 10,000 acres as Walmart and multinationals like Dole effectively make the future of Florida strawberries as a commercially viabile employment less and less possible. The benefits are cheaper strawberries optimized less for taste, but for long distance shipping and pretty much are tending to relegate Florida Strawberries to U-Pick and farmers' market operations plus home gardeners. Regulations and government subsidies are widely recognized as grossly unfair against US growers, compared with ever increasing strict US regulations. If only breeders would focus on hydroponic traits in selections, this clearly losing paradigm might be shifted back into the US's favor in some areas, as strawberries is a high value crop that has always been on the edge of possibly going hydroponic. Instead, The best shipping resistant US commercial cultivars principally developed by the Univ of FL (especially 'Strawberry Festival', named for the Plant City Strawberry Festival and commonly called 'Festival') an to a lesser extent Univ of CA (for example, 'Camarosa') and are both adapted well to Michoacan, Guanajuato and Baja California, led by contracts, paybacks and subsidies among governments, drug cartels (Michoacan's economy is dominated by the cartels and nothing can be done withiout approval) and the following multinational catalyst players: Driscoll's, Green Giant, and Dole Foods to follow the Walmart business model using the Sinaloa tomato model. Hopefully this explains why strawberries 'don't taste as good as they used to' and why hydroponics might become a more saving niche and local opportunity, if breeders only changed their mindset (they won't, since our state ag instuitutions receive a couple cents royalties to supply the farmers using conventional growing methods, including from Mexico - simply there are no champions of the hydroponic's cause and farmer's have little leverage when it comes to international trade and the politics of the ag departments of their local tax dollars built). Absent that, recalling the perfect temperature for growing strawberries is a high in the 70's (F) and a low in the upper 40's (F) to 50's (F), as Mexico catches on, I have no doubt that the Florida Strawberry industry and its 12,500 jobs will be out of business over the next 10 years, thanks in part to enterprising Mexicans that made liberal use of UF and UC professors earning "consulting fees" on the side with Mexican vacations helping transfer farm technology in a strawberry wonderland at perfect year round temperatures that slaughters US weather year round at all but the very best months. Part of the Mexican growing systems utilize hydroponic fertilizers for fertigation. I mention this only to show how enterprising farmers can utilize some hydroponic methods and breeding programs set up by state institutions and cannibalize the agricultural interests that established them in the fiorst place. Also, because an unstated goal of the trial was to learn enough to see whether I could start a profitable business growing strawberries. That was a no-brainer - the answer is it isn't worth doing except for a U-Pick farm to sell local high end, high risk crops. BTW, average rainfall in Michoacan is less than 1" monthly (less loss to fungi and bacteria - preferred by strawberries) and solar exposure is always more in Mexico than in California and all the Florida growing months, and intensive picking labor is much cheaper and essentially unregulated. OK, back to the trial, but that was an important topic for my trial, now it will just be for a hobby and I'll leave the up and coming strawberry mongels to the Mexicans, They'll have double the Florida acreage in just the state of Michoacan alone in the next two years and likely continue exporting 98% of it, swamping completely Florida's winter crop which in recent years has been the exclusive provider of strawberries for US consumption representing 15% of American strawberries. I also checked the Solar energy maps from the Department of Energy. While the story on average was not great, the consolation was that some winters have been worse in historical data from Plant City vs. NE FL, I assume due to cloud cover, but at the threshold the 25% more energy they get is difficult to compete with. Final assessment. Yes. Get the earliest producer possible, and plant 2 weeks earlier. That's part of the reason I chose 'Sweet Charlie' which was patented based on three things: Super early heavy production, high brix, and the first strawberry developed for Florida that had Anthracnose (Colletotrichum acutatum) Fruit and Crown Rot resistance. I hope not to be posting examples of this fungus. which is even worse than it sounds! This post was edited by PupillaCharites on Sun, Nov 24, 13 at 12:45