Home-grown strawberries are infinitely better than shop bought, probably because they’re picked when ripe and not flown halfway across the world to sit on the shelves of your local supermarket.
The problem is, though, strawberries are rather tasty fruits for other creatures too: slugs, birds, mice - all find your precious strawberry plants a great source of party-time food. There’s little worse for the foodie gardener than watching in anticipation as your fruits ripen towards perfection, only to find some other critter has got there first when the time comes to harvest.
There are of course ways to help stop this - slug control, netting against birds, and straw on the ground underneath the fruits can all increase the chances of you getting an unnibbled crop, but have ever considered growing strawberries in hanging baskets?
The advantages are numerous. For a start, your strawberries will be way out of reach of all but the most determined of slugs and snails, and mice are likewise not widely known for their mountaineering skills.
Growing in containers also allows you to control the soil conditions, and to easily keep competition from weeds in check.
Finally, hanging baskets are most often placed in areas with heavy human traffic - patios and the like - which will tend to discourage most birds from feasting on your fruits.
There are of course one or two disadvantages. Like all container gardening, water is a concern. You need to allow adequate drainage in wet weather to stop the plants drowning, but also on hot days baskets can quickly become parched. If you already have plants in containers though, such as herbs, strawberries really need no extra work than you’re already doing.
So what do you need to do? Firstly, it’s probably better to look for a perpetual variety of strawberry such as Flamenco or Challenger, which can produce flowers and fruit from April until the first frosts. They won’t crop as heavily as summer-fruiting varieties, but in a basket a long season is better than a short-lived glut.
You can plant three young plants into one 10-12″ basket and get good results for the first year or two, but after this you need to start dividing your plants in the spring to stop them getting overcrowded.
A good watering regime is essential - they won’t like being flooded, but don’t want to dry out either (wilting stems is a sure sign of this, but the plants will recover very quickly following a watering). For plenty of good tasty fruits, a dose of tomato feed each week is a good idea.
Pre-planted baskets are widely available from garden centres, and while the cost may at first seem fairly steep (around £7-10 per basket), you only need to look at the price of strawberries in the shops to see that it won’t take long until you’re up on the deal - and your plants will last for years, giving you pound after pound of superior fruit.
Blooming Direct offer a super-sweet Fragaria Ananassa strawberry plant which produces fruit throughout the summer months.
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