When you think of planting fruits and vegetables, it’s done on your hands and knees, digging small holes in the dirt in your yard.
But when you have 17,000 strawberry plants to get in the ground like Chuck and Diane Souther at Apple Hill Farm do, there just isn’t the time to plant them individually.
And here’s a fun fact: “Strawberries are one of the more difficult crops we grow,” Chuck said.
There’s way too many other things to get accomplished this spring on their farm, so I see why my request to help out was met with a yes. Plus the Southers enjoy the Insider, but who doesn’t?
All I knew was that I needed to show up one morning for planting duty. I expected there would be some dirt flying around, we were after all putting plants in the ground, so I wore some old clothes I use for gardening around my house.
It’s a good thing I did.
Instead of kneeling in the soil, digging small holes to put the roots of each plant in, I sat in a little seat on the back of tractor next to Diane, while Chuck drove. The pictures give a better description.
With about 250 water- and dirt-drenched small wendy strawberry plants in a bin in front of me, we slowly started to move backward. It was a little slower than the typical pace they plant the strawberries at, but I was a rookie so they took it easy on me.
“We would have gone about twice as fast,” Diane told me after.
In between our two seats was a little wheel that had extensions off of it. Those extensions included a little plastic pincher on the end of each one that we placed the crown of the plant in.
The roots hung down and were inserted in the ground as we moved down the row. They are planted every 12 inches and each row is about 250 feet.
The plan was to rotate who put the plant in the pincher. Sometimes Diane had to pick up the slack, but it probably wasn’t her first time showing someone the ropes. But by the second row, I was keeping up quite well.
You can’t miss a turn because then there’s no strawberries planted in that area and then what are you going to pick?
The plants we put in the ground last week will be ready for harvest next June, when the three-week window for strawberry picking commences.
“We plant strawberries every year with that thought process,” Chuck said.
The ones you’ll pick this year, if you decide to pick some fresh and juicy strawberries, will be the third crop off the existing group, which will be its last year.
That’s why this group of 17,000 wendy strawberries are being planted now, so there will be strawberries next year.
“We’ve been happy with wendy. It’s done well and our customers like it,” Chuck said. “It’s got good flavor and that’s what the customers want.”
In all, we planted four rows of about 250 plants, which is a grand total of about 1,000. That means I’m responsible for probably about 45 percent of those. Not bad for a morning working a job that isn’t my job.
I just can’t wait to enjoy the fruits of my labor – literally.
