Fun Facts About Strawberries

Strawberries are the quickest berry on the scene. The speed at which they produce could just be because they're not berries at all. Technically berries have seeds on the inside and they don't come from a single ovary, so strawberries are really in a group all their own.

Every strawberry has an average of about 200 seeds. Each of those little seeds could turn into its own plant, however, it's berry unlikely.

The reason for this is that most varieties of strawberries produce runners, also known as stolons. These runners will eventually develop their own roots, resulting in a clone of the mother plant. Once these adventitious roots establish in the soil, the runners begin to dry up and shrivel away. For this reason, using strawberry plant runners for propagation makes it especially easy to make more plants.

It's calculated that 94% of American households consume these berries. To further that, according to the USDA, Americans eat 3.4 lbs. of fresh strawberries a year and another 1.8 lbs of frozen strawberries.

That's a lot of berries!

And since every one of those berries needs to be pollinated, they can either rely on the occasional breeze, or you can recruit the help of your bees!

Pollinating your strawberries with the help of your honey bees will result in bigger and juicer strawberries. It's just science.

Planting Requirements For Strawberries

Light: Strawberries require lots of sunlight to produce fruit. Ten or more hours of sunlight each day is ideal, but they need a minimum of six hours of direct sunlight each day.

Soil: They grow best in a deep, sandy loam soil rich in organic matter. The soil must be well-drained.

Spacing: It's best to plant your strawberries 12 to 18 inches apart. They tend to spread out very quickly. By giving them a bit of space to allow the runners to grow, you can have a very full patch with just a few mother plants.

Planting Time: Plant them in the spring, as early as several weeks before the last frost date.

Zones: Strawberries can be grown as perennials in USDA zones 5-8 or as cool-season annuals in zones 9-10.

Time of Bloom: They'll bloom as soon as the weather begins to warm in the spring. Most strawberries bear their fruit in June. They should be ready soon!