Thread: Strawberry Boxes

I had two 1.5m² patches of strawberries adjacent to each other. One type with a pink flower, and the other traditional white. The white flower fruits were superior taste and yield, and the pink flowered plants were not as robust. I just pulled out the pink flower jobbies and put them in the compost.

The fruits would often lie on the ground and get eaten by critters of all kinds, so I thought I'd build some boxes to get them up off the ground. The fruits can hang over the side of the boxes.

I dug out half the soil, added some sawdust (plenty of that here!) and some cold compost that has been hanging around for years. Dug down about 250mm, put the first 3 boxes in place, filled them up and transplanted. Then repeated that for the second side as I worked across the old patch.

The construction is simple enough. 150x25mm H4 pine is cheap at ~$16 per 5.4m, so I needed two lengths for each box 300mm high and 2.5m long. The offcuts became the ends and middle spacer. Painted them up to preserve them and keep the H4 away from the plants, screwed together with 75mm 14g screws. Sugar Cane Mulch in between to walk on, and as mulch in the boxes.

Strawberry Boxes.JPG


So I've lost some planting area for the convenience of being able to walk between them (which will make harvesting much less strain), but it also yielded over a cube of soil that was needed for the lower end of the garden. It is 1.2m deep of fill down there and it had settled down at least 100mm below the original (somewhat packed) level, so that all worked out well.



Now what I am keen to see is what the yield is like next season. I have been told that they need to be replaced every 2 seasons due to diminishing yields. No real big deal I suppose - the plants you can see in the pic all came from 4 seedlings originally, but now I will need to replace them with 12.