11 Tips For Growing Strawberries in Raised Beds: This season, are you considering planting strawberries in your raised garden beds but are unsure of where to begin? Are strawberries even better grown in elevated beds? This season, produce strawberries on raised garden beds with these expert tips from Logan Hailey, an organic gardening expert.
It’s difficult to imagine a summer garden without plump, sweet strawberries dangling from your garden beds. Once you taste the rich fragrant flavors of homegrown strawberries, you’ll never want to go back to their grocery store counterparts.
11 Tips For Growing Strawberries in Raised Beds
Why Grow in Raised Beds?
Little herbaceous perennials, strawberries thrive in loamy, well-drained soil. These plants belong to the Rosaceae family, which is indigenous to North America. They can be grown in zones 4–12 across the United States.
Surprisingly easy to grow even for beginners, strawberries can be planted in hanging baskets, pots, and containers. They can also be utilized as a perennial ground cover. Raised garden beds, however, arguably provide the tastiest strawberries.
Tips For Growing in Raised Beds
After learning the advantages of cultivating strawberries on raised garden beds this year, let’s look at some of my best advice that will help make your harvest stand out from prior years!
Start With a Quality Raised Bed
All that an elevated garden box filled with soil is, is a raised bed. Raised beds come in a huge variety that may be built or purchased, and almost all of them are suitable for strawberries.
When choosing your raised bed, bear in mind that most strawberries want a root zone that is at least 10 to 12 inches deep and need around 1 square foot of room per plant. Additionally, you want to confirm that the materials you choose for your landscaping will last a long time, be non-toxic, and look well.
- Untreated wood
- Elevated wooden planters on a deck
- Brick or rock-lined beds
- Soil mounds with geo-textile fabric
- Hugelkultur (layered “lasagna style”) beds
- Watering troughs (galvanized metal garden beds)
Other materials and styles are not ideal for strawberries because they may leach toxins into the soil or simply not allow enough growing space for the plants to proliferate. If you want to grow wholesome organic strawberries, pay close attention to the safety of your garden beds because your plants will uptake whatever is in the soil and water of the bed.
Avoid these types of raised garden beds:
- Railroad ties
- Pressure-treated wood
- Painted wood
- Concrete blocks
- Old tires
- Shallow beds
The last thing to take into consideration when designing your beds is the size of each garden box. You don’t want a strawberry bed to be any wider than 3-4 feet, or it may be difficult to reach the center to harvest, weed, and prune. Beds can be 4-12 feet long or more depending on your yard space and materials. Most importantly, make sure the bed is a minimum of 1 foot deep so you can reap all the benefits of raised bed gardening.
Place Your Bed in Full Sunlight
Every day, strawberries require at least 6 to 8 hours in direct sunlight. It’s crucial to locate your bed construction in a section of the garden that won’t be shaded by surrounding buildings, trees, or your house.
You can use Google Earth satellite images to assess your yard’s sun aspect and choose the best spot to plant strawberries. Keep in mind that while the beds will last for a very long time, the strawberries are merely transient perennials. For a variety of crops, raised garden beds should be placed north to south to receive full sunlight.
Pinch The First Flowers in Spring
There are occasions when delaying immediate gratification is necessary to reap greater rewards later on. Strawberries in raised beds are frequently ready to begin flowering almost immediately after planting.
Pinch off the early blossoms to encourage the plant to focus its energy on growing roots, even though you desire really early fruit. When the plants have grown rapidly for two to three weeks (usually in early May), it’s time to let the strawberries grow and start bearing fruit.
Prune Off All Runners
When left unattended, strawberries tend to become a matted mess. Although this can work wonders for groundcover, it’s not the best way to get the most out of your raised bed harvests. You’ll get more luscious berries if you work a little bit harder to remove strawberry runners.
Don’t Overcrowd Your Beds
Another typical error made by novice gardeners when planting raised beds is overcrowding. Strawberry plugs or bare root strawberry crowns may appear little when planted, but they require a lot of room to grow and thrive.
The majority of strawberry cultivars require 8 to 10″ of spacing between plants. To go one step further, I like to give each strawberry plant roughly one square foot of room.
This keeps the plants from overly competing with one another as they grow into large, delectable bushes capable of bearing up to one pound of berries during the summer.
Final Thoughts
Once you grow strawberries in raised beds, you’ll probably never go back to growing them straight in the ground. These delicious vivid red berries thrive in the loamy soil and superior drainage of a lifted growing space. Again, just to recap, here’s our tips:
- Start with raised beds that are non-toxic and at least 10-12” deep
- Grow strawberries in full sunlight
- Fill raised beds with loamy, rich soil
- Choose everbearing or day-neutral varieties
- Pinch of the first flowers in spring
- Prune off all runners
- Give strawberries 1 square foot of space per plant
- Use companion plants to boost growth
- Keep raised beds well-weeded
- Mulch with straw
- Avoid overhead irrigation
