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Jenny-Jack Sun Farm "good food news" Traditionally, October is the time for planting Strawberry plugs. We ordered them months ago amidst the heat intensified pace of summer work, and picked them up in Atlanta last week off a truck from a North Carolina farm, who organically grows plugs for commercial farms. Every year we order new plugs because, while strawberries can be grown as a perennial, fruiting is most plentiful the first year. The heat and humidity of the south also promotes possible disease among the plants that are held over. We can’t keep up with weeding so many plants throughout the summer, so we plant them on plastic mulch instead of letting them spread out their runners into the bare soil. Home gardeners who can keep up with weeding a smaller strawberry plot would certainly do well to establish a perennial patch. These 2800 ‘Chandler’ plants look robust and healthy which will benefit their durability during our typically unpredictable winter. Starting with sturdy stock does not guarantee success but it does provide a boost in initial growth before December’s chill stalls progress until early spring. By week’s end, with the help of a couple of additional hands, we should have all of the strawberry plants planted firmly into the cool, amended, autumn soil and with plenty of time to translate accommodating, warmish, wistful afternoons into adaptive, root roaming opportunities. And a little rain, just a little every once in a while, would exponentially enrich our berry-burying efforts. Just thought I would mention that hopeful prayer in case it helps with things. Strawberries are eye-catching and sweet and charmingly captivate the palate, promptly signaling the brain to reach recklessly for another. One never satisfies. Their brilliance is in their capacity to enter the mouth and instantly infuse intricate flavors across every taste bud, swarming the senses like the final seconds of a firework show. The taste is treasured and talked about like a cherished memory, but what is often left unspoken is the jarring, jaded journey taken to constitute such romantic devouring. For a farmer to produce a worthy harvest, where berries decoratively dangle from slender stretching stems like red Christmas lights draped across a tree, one must begin by properly amending, bedding, flattening, and irrigating beds. These plants are renting soil and space for the next eight months so proper preparation is imperative for that rent check to blossom into a fair wage. The next taxing step is laying plastic. One of our fields is equipped with reusable landscape fabric which covers all exposed dirt leaving open only the small holes for the plants. Yesterday we spent the afternoon on hands and knees slowly stretching tightly the plastic down the length of the bed, hammering hard six inch sod stapes every six feet into dry, walking row hardpan. Today we covered the second field with biodegradable plastic; one person walked backward slowly unrolling the fragile fabric and the other two shuffled soil from the walking rows onto the edges, flattening and securing it onto the 30-inch bed top. The black plastic warms early spring soil and lessens, not eliminates, weed pressure. After planting, the next step is intensive monitoring for the next four months; watering effectively, scouting for ant mounds, covering when we plummet to very cold weather, spot weeding, and fabricating favorable deer protection. By March, we let sunshine and spring magic masterfully conduct their renewing ritual whereby the sad and stagnate ignite into the full glory of their intention. Their arrival means the resplendent ripening of the strawberry is at hand and the final chore unfolds;
