“Strawberry plants are relatively inexpensive. When starting out, get many different cultivars, and include both everbearing and short day types, to see which will perform best in your system(s). A minimum of 12 plants of each type should give you a good idea of plant performance. Buy more plants than you need (~50% more) and select the best of the plants. Select plants with good amount of fine roots, these will establish better than plants with just coarse roots. Select plants with crowns at least 1 cm diameter in size. Don’t use plants that seem diseased or rotted. You can hold your extra plants in small pots (i.e. tree bands) until you are sure your main system plants are established. When you plant, make sure the roots are straight down in the substrate. If the lower parts of the roots are bent or curved (J-hooked) the plants will take much longer to establish (how fussy strawberry is!)

Plant sequentially. For winter production plant once in July, twice in August and twice in September to determine which planting dates will hit your targets and to smooth out the flushes of fruiting that will be happening. Dormant plants will typically break dormancy when shipped, so it would be best to have your plants shipped for the dates you plan to plant rather than getting them all at once and trying to store. Although, we have stored plants for 2-3 weeks at 4C that had been shipped and had broken dormancy, with reasonably good results. Mold is the issue of storing plants with leaf tissue starting to emerge.

So, if you want to grow strawberry in greenhouse for winter production, but don’t want to invest in new systems, start where you are! Make it work with what you have and then you will have the expertise to advance to more commercial systems. Or you just might find that your existing systems, combined with the experience you accumulate might be just what you need.”

Witten by Mark Kroggel (Apr 2014)