Sunday, March 1, 2009

Building a Strawberry Tower - Intro

Last weekend, I built a Strawberry Tower.

I wanted to grow Strawberries this season because my kids love to eat Strawberries and it gets expensive to buy Strawberries on a regular basis. Plus, Southern California has the perfect weather for growing Strawberries.

I looked at various ways to grow Strawberries. I thought about converting one of my raised beds to a Strawberry Patch. But, I was concerned about bugs and snails invading the Patch and ruining the fruit. Plus, most of my raised beds have been used to grow Tomatoes and I read that you should not grow Strawberries in the same soil, because Verticillium Wilt could get transfered.

I lalso ooked at the various container methods to grow Strawberries. From just a plain Planter to the "Strawberry Jar".

The biggest problem with growing Strawberries in containers is watering (i.e. keeping the soil around the Strawberry plants moist). I have a drip irrigation system setup to water my Cherry Tomatoes and Winter Melon plants. It would be relatively straight forward to hook up the drip irrigation network to the Strawberry containers. So watering would not be a problem.

The other issue is that I did not want to clutter up my backyard with Strawberry Planters! I much rather have one big giant planter than many smaller planters.

I finally settled on a Strawberry Tower from AgroTower.

A Strawberry Tower is a multi-level planter with pockets to accommodate strawberry plants. Since you can stack layers of strawberry plants on top of each other, the Strawberry Tower maximizes the amount of strawberries you can grow in a small area.

Each layer of pockets is offset from the layer above and below it, enabling each strawberry plant to get sunlight. In addition, the Strawberry Tower is very water efficient, as water from the top level trickles down to water the lower level.

Links to more of my Strawberry Tower Blog Entries:



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