48 Strawberries in 8 SIPs

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Thanks for all your help!

Finally have it done for the most part. Still need another dozen paper clips and to build the racks for them, but the plants are in. Was a lot more learning, work, time and money than I was expecting when I first came up with the idea.

After 4 days of sitting mostly full of mix and full of water, the mix was damp but not up to wet or moist. I did end up pulling the mix I put in dry at first and hydrated it in a wheel barrow with a shovel. Was kind of counter intuitive to put in the fertilizer strip.... just seemed like tooooooo much. After a lot of reading I went with 2 cups of really low NPK rose fertilizer mixed with a loose 1.5 quarts of vermicast.

Would post a pic, but there isn't much to look at.... some black plastic mulch stretched over some totes. Half of them are bare root Albions so next to nothing is really showing and the other half are plants out of last years window box failure. Picked the plants which had the best single crowns. Those were fun to get through the little "X"s in the black plastic!

Will post a pic or two when the start showing some decent signs of life, assuming I didn't botch the whole project too badly.

One thing that amazed me about the last years window boxes (3 1/2' long, I think) was how very root bound the 6 plants were.... literally one massive, tangled up root structure the size and shape of the box with a little soil mixed in. No wonder the things stalled out half way through the season.

Again, thanks for all your help!

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Put the Albion bare root crowns in Sunday morning after a 3 hour soak in warm water and Tuesday morning about half are showing signs of life! Not a total failure yet! (They still looked dead when I pulled them out of the water.)

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Finally got the racks built had some time to deal with some images:

Transplants of the unknown variety I have went in well.



The new Albion bare root crowns are coming to life and poking their heads out.



Not a First Class Ticket on the Fail Train yet.

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Albions are doing alright.


This is encouraging.





6 Extra plants waiting to be picked up (or already forgotten about)

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Will try again with the images. (Short edit time here is not so idjit conducive.)

Albions are doing alright:


This is encouraging.





6 Extra plants waiting to be picked up (or already forgotten about)

[applestar]

I didn't get around to buying Albion strawberries, so I will be looking forward to your progress reports and flavor review

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(Pretty sure they will taste like every other strawberry to me..... one little bit and by first reaction will be "Why did I try these again.".)

Albions each have 2 or 3 leaf stems and are not even 4" tall and most of them are pushing out 2 or 3 buds! Am amazed by it! They have been in Mel's mix in SIPs for just 18 days. Not sure if it the mix, the SIPs or what, but tiny little plants with barely any foliage pushing out buds!

Whole lot of foliage, buds and blossoms on the unknown strain of 1, 2 and 3 year old plants. They are only 18 days into their new home as well.

Even the unknowns in the 2 liter SIPs are taking off and loaded with buds. If they don't get picked up, am going to leave them in the 2 liter SIPs just to see what happens. They will stall out mid summer and probably end up just as root bound as the window boxes I over crowded last year.

My GUESS is that the right fert in Mel's mix in the containers has the soil temp up enough that they think it is later in the year that it really is.

The window boxes were amusing to take apart. I was lifting on giant root mass out of the box and having at them with s ginsu knife to separate the plants out. Some of those plants went into a bed and are doing well. Luckily I was able to pawn off two of the boxes to folks at work so I wouldn't have to deal with them.

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Albions are still 4" or less but have over a dozen blossoms flowering and a lot of buds still growing. Almpst kind of looks wrong. Plants that small and this young shouldn't be pushing that many blooms. Guess the flush of berries will yield small fruit.

The Unknown strain are thriving, blossoms and buds all over the place with a whole lot of foliage.

SIPs, Mel's mix with a center strip of 2 cups of low value rose fertilizer mixed with vermicast definitely seems to be the way to go. The plants in the SIPs are well ahead of the 50 or so plants I have in the ground.

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Have some happy plants!

The Albions are nigh a month old at this point. This just doesn't seem right to me.




Unknowns are doing well too.





The 6 "Oh, I'll be by to pic them up" in 2 liter SIPs are doing okay. Soon to be root bound I bet.


Reinforcements are doing well too. Am pretty sure I could have dense-packed theses a little tighter if I tried harder.

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Talk about messing up in reverse!









I can't get a good angle to actually show the density of blossoms and buds.

SIP's are definitely working well. (Almost makes me wonder if planting in the ground is actually worth the effort.)

[applestar]

Yay! Looking great!

I think you will find that the SIP's will produce their berries earlier, possibly bigger and more numerous, but the in-ground ones will also produce at a different schedule so you might have continuous harvest for an extended period.

...at least that's been my experience with strawberries planted all over my garden in different micro-climates.

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Thanks. I did listen to everyone and learn even if I took the hard path with it.

That sounds like a good strategy with the varying micro-climets. Have somewhere around 100 plants going, so it shouldn't turn out all bad. Have been thinking about a wattle raised bed + Hugelkultur. Might be a good place to transplant some of this years runners.

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So, a month into the plants going into the SIPs, I have some small berries forming on both the Albions on the unknown strain I had, and I have more blossoms than before!

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Deer came to visit and snack. They seem to like young hosta and tulips too.





Everything else seem to be going okay.

[applestar]

Oh dear....

...ok ok couldn't resist...

I will go with

Not quite as bad as this, I guess, though I have this in my repertoire