Vertical beds for strawberries - beautiful and practical

Strawberry truly is the queen of the garden. Not a single amateur gardener can imagine his garden without this berry, which is healthy and amazingly tasty. There is a well-established opinion that strawberries are difficult to care for. This is partly true. But how nice it is to pick the first berry, the most delicious and aromatic! However, the rest will also bring great pleasure.

Content:

• What are vertical beds
• How to make vertical beds
• Some tips for strawberry lovers

What are vertical beds

Vertical beds for strawberries - an excellent alternative to classic beds for growing this berry. This plant cultivation technology is suitable for owners of small plots of land. After all, in order to get a bucket of strawberries grown in the traditional way, you need to occupy a well-lit area of ​​15-20 square meters for planting. And besides this berry, summer residents want to place a lot of other crops on their six hundred square meters. This is where a vertical bed comes in handy to save space in the garden. Even if you don’t have a summer house at all, you can enjoy fresh berries by creating a similar mini-garden on your balcony.

And the vertical method of growing strawberries will appeal to lazy gardeners. Now they won’t have to crawl on their knees and bend their backs in front of the “queen,” pulling out weeds and tendrils or picking berries. Caring for such a bed is incomparably easier.

The use of such a design makes strawberry bushes practically inaccessible to rodents. And it will be problematic for birds to find a place to land, which means your ripe berries will remain unharmed. And not just unharmed, but also clean, because now it does not come into contact with the ground, therefore, it will not get dirty and will not rot. Try to resist the temptation here and not eat a few berries straight from the bush!

There is one more advantage with this method of planting - decorative effect. Vertical beds look amazingly spectacular, especially when the bushes are covered with bright, ripe berries. Place such a berry flowerbed under the windows of your country house, and you can admire it in moments of relaxation.

How to make vertical beds

To create a vertical bed, just stack several containers of the same or different diameters on top of each other. Depending on the ratio of their diameters, the bed can be in the form of a cylinder or a truncated cone (cascade).

Large flower pots of different diameters are perfect for forming a cascade design. Fill them with soil and place one on top of the other. To ensure the stability of this structure, it is better to string the pots onto a rod firmly fixed in the ground - a strong wooden stake, a metal tube or a piece of building reinforcement. The bed is ready. All that remains is to plant the strawberry bushes in the free space, which is the difference in diameters of the two levels, and wait for the harvest.

To create a vertical cylindrical bed, you can use old car tires. In principle, column-shaped structures do not have to be prefabricated. For these purposes, an old barrel, a rectangular plywood box, or a piece of thick PVC pipe will do.

Of course, unlike cascading beds, for structures of constant diameter you will need to make slits in the side walls for strawberry leaves. Don't forget to think ahead irrigation system. For sufficiently tall structures, special “irrigation channels” will be required inside the column. This can be a piece of metal-plastic pipe with holes made in it for water, which must be protected from clogging with earth and plant roots.

With skillful hands and a little ingenuity, you can organize automatic watering of the garden beds.
In principle, in stores you can find ready-made construction kits for constructing a vertical bed. But it’s so nice to make something beautiful and unusual with your own hands. Design solutions and materials can be very diverse - it all depends on your imagination.

Some tips for strawberry lovers

• It is better to assemble a large structure at a permanent place planned for it, otherwise the difficult issue of its transportation will arise. When choosing a location, remember that strawberries do not like shade.
• If you are interested in getting a good berry harvest, take care of the quality composition of the soil with which you will fill the containers. Strawberries prefer light sandy loam and peat soils. The most suitable composition for growing this berry is a mixture of peat, coconut substrate, perlite and vermiculite. Don't forget to feed your plants regularly.
• A vertical bed requires constant control over the moisture of the soil - in the heat it dries out quickly, so watering must be done regularly.
• Think in advance about protecting your strawberries from winter frosts.For the winter, a structure made from flower pots can be disassembled and taken to a protected place; PVC pipes can be laid on the ground. Whatever the design solution for your garden bed, there will always be a way out, but you need to find it before you start work.

Compared to traditional growing method vertical beds have many advantages, due to which the popularity of this technology is rapidly growing. Maybe those gardeners who did not grow strawberries, fearing the difficulties associated with it, will now change their minds. And amazing beds will appear on their plots, allowing them to harvest a larger harvest of these delicious berries.