Strawberries in Your Home Garden
Local pros discuss which to pick and how to grow them
By Claire Bradley | Illustrations by Cathy Raingarden
Growing your own fruit doesn’t get easier or tastier than strawberries!
They come in a tempting array of varieties, all relatively compact in size, and the flavors of freshly picked berries put the store-bought alternative to shame. The time to buy the plants is now, as winter turns to spring, and nurseries are ready to offer expert advice for choosing and growing a beautiful home harvest.
“Honestly, there are so many different strawberries, it is mind-blowing!” enthuses Amanda Lord of East Bay Nursery in Berkeley, which will offer no less than eight varieties this spring. Given the overwhelming choice, it’s worth thinking through your strawberry growing goals, starting with when you want to harvest.
Choosing your variety
June-bearing strawberries ripen…well…in June, as the name suggests. LeAnn Quinn of Sloat Garden Center in Pleasant Hill says, “These are some of the best quality strawberries; they’re great for canning, for pies, for when you want them all at once.”
If you want harvests from spring through fall, Quinn will point you toward everbearing strawberries like the European alpine varieties, which produce tiny bursts of flavor, some even with tropical notes. Also among the everbearing are day-neutral berries like ‘Albion,’ which fruit even when days are short. For container-growing, Quinn suggests ‘Quinault,’ a unique variety that produces berries on its runners. It makes for a stunning effect in a hanging basket.
Oaktown Native Plant Nursery in Berkeley and Watershed Nursery in Richmond both carry native wild strawberries. These include woodland strawberries, which do well in dry, shaded areas and tolerate clay, and beach strawberries, which prefer full sun and tolerate sand. Both can thrive in containers. Natives can be intensely flavorful, but they do not fruit as prolifically as the cultivated hybrids.
Randall Barnes of Orchard Nursery in Lafayette stocks the varieties he has grown in his home garden. His top June-bearing pick is the intensely sweet ‘Chandler.’ For everbearing, it’s a toss-up between ‘Eversweet’ (fruits above 85 degrees) and ‘Seascape,’ which Barnes says ripens early and is “the one that people love dipping in chocolate the most.” For container planting, Barnes suggests alpines for their compact mounding habit.
Growing healthy plants
Strawberries need plentiful water, nutrients, and sunlight. Quinn recommends an all-purpose fertilizer and cautions, “whatever you buy, follow the instructions on the package. More is not better with fertilizer.” Along with planting into rich soil amended with worm casings, Barnes regularly applies liquid sea kelp, which has been shown to boost soil and plant health.
To avoid pests and fungal problems, strawberries should be mulched with straw or bark. “Berries on the dirt will either rot or bugs will eat them,” says Quinn, who suggests building little structures with LEGO bricks or upside-down berry baskets as an easy way to keep the berries off the ground. Lord reminds us of the value in using an organic mineral oil spray to help battle an aphid or spider mite infestation.
Companion plants can also deter pests and boost fruit production by attracting beneficial insects and pollinators. Lord cites borage, a bee favorite “which re-seeds majestically,” while Quinn mentions sweet alyssum, an edible flower that brings in aphid-busting parasitic wasps. Barnes plants strawberries in proximity to pollinator-friendly thyme or near garlic and onions, which repel slugs and snails. Kimmy Ortmann at Watershed Nursery suggests growing heuchera, Douglas iris, and currants with woodland strawberries and seaside daisy and coast gumplant alongside beach strawberries. Suzanne Howard-Carter at Oaktown Native Plant Nursery says she has spotted native woodland strawberries growing under salmonberry in the wild.
While strawberry plants are perennials, they will decline after a few years. But Quinn explains that you can keep your patch going via the plants’ natural reproduction method. She points to the runners, which are the long stems that grow from a parent plant and sprout new plants. You can simply allow the baby plants to root—pinning them to the ground can speed this up—and wait until the new plant has established ample roots of its own before detaching from the parent plant.
Harvesting and storing for peak flavor
To achieve their perfection of sweetness, strawberries must receive full sun and ripen fully on the plant. “If they’re not sweet tasting,” says Quinn, “it’s from not enough sun.” It could also be from impatience; Barnes urges gardeners not to pick strawberries until they are completely red. You may have some competition from hungry birds, so netting is a good investment.
Barnes adds that you don’t want to wash strawberries until you’re ready to eat or process them. Store them with the stems on in a single layer. If you have a glut, they can be sliced up and frozen for up to three months.
Nothing compares to a perfectly ripe, just-picked strawberry; it’s worth the effort to grow your own. As Quinn says, “Everyone should grow strawberries. They don’t take much room!” ♦
Claire Bradley gardens on her Oakland balcony and shares her experience with fellow small-space container gardeners in a blog called “Botany on the Balcony.”
Cathy Raingarden draws everywhere as an urban sketcher. You can see her drawings on IG @cathyraingarden and read her drawing blog on Substack @CathyRaingardensSketchbook.
