Clean Up

The strawberry plants are still dormant, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t still keeping us busy. About this time of the year we have to do what we call “cleaning the strawberries.” Over the winter, weeds like to start growing under the warm plastic that we lay down for the strawberries and they start to poke up out of the holes. The strawberries are dormant from the cold weather so right now they are still rather small. The weeds have no problem growing up and over the poor little strawberry plants. It’s our job to make sure that the strawberries can still have all the sunlight and space that they want. We have to go through the field and cut the weeds off of each individual strawberry plant! It’s a job that takes up a few weeks but luckily during the winter, we don’t have too many other crops to attend to.

Pretty soon it will be time to start covering and uncovering the plants to see if we can’t get some blossoms started! Strawberry season will be here before you know it. It typically takes a month to go from blossom to strawberry. We usually try to aim for April as our start date for picking strawberries. Last year was a little different… We had an extraordinarily warm February which made the strawberry plants think that spring was here early! They started blossoming and we were out picking strawberries in March. Normally, the plants will start to blossom at the end of February or even early March and we will have strawberries to pick at the beginning of April. So far things are looking pretty good. The temperatures are staying in a good range and right now there aren’t any blossoms. In a few weeks that should change but for now we are right on schedule!