It was on my bucket list to grow strawberries. I am not sure why because I don’t really like strawberries. But, my husband and kids do, so thought I would tackle it. We already had five Grow Bags set out for potatoes and two for zucchini.

I had one bag left. I get a little excited when I go to the garden centre sometimes. It is something about the potential that really gets me going. I bought six plants that were in 4″ pots, and another bundle of a different variety. But I didn’t know there were 25 actual plants in that bundle, I thought it was just one. Imagine my surprise when I got home and read the instructions. 25 plants.

What the hell am I going to do with 31 strawberry plants?

The one set of six in the 4″ pots went into the planter bag, so those were taken care of. The others, I had to do some creative problem solving. We happened to have a pallet in the yard because my daughter K wanted to do a vertical garden.

We took that old pallet and some landscape fabric we had in the shed. It was one of those rolls from Costco so is pretty heavy fabric. I measured the length of the pallet, doubled that and added length for the width of the pallet. I pushed the fabric inside the pallet then stapled them along the outside on the wood making sure that the staples were close enough that dirt couldn’t escape very easily. 

We had two 2x4s long enough to make the support – it is just them on a diagonal screwed into the sides. Once it was upright and facing the south we filled with dirt. That part seemed to take a long time. I would say 2 or 3 big dirt bags went in there and in hindsight because strawberries don’t have deep roots I might do other vegetables instead. Though I don’t know which ones yet because I am just a beginner. 😝

Once the dirt was in I planned out the 25 plants for placements so it looked pretty and cut horizontal slits to plant the strawberries. Those particular strawberry plants were the kind that had 25 bundled together with just one thin root. So the hole didn’t have to be large. 

Then when they started growing I pinched the flowers off for the first good two months.

Updated from September 2020: my sister J advised to cut off the runners because all the plant’s energy was going to that. So once we did that, we got so many more berries! These are shots from my instagram account: