We have recently expanded our container garden to include some strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries.
Last year I planted a couple of two-year-old blueberry plants, only to have them flounder through the summer and get nearly destroyed by winter-starved bunnies. These both appear to have made it through the winter alive. I’ve transplanted them into containers and will nurse them through this year.
I also had one surviving raspberry start we got from Burgess Nursery a couple years ago. This start was a bare-root twig that didn’t do very well at our old extremely shaded house.
This past weekend we picked up some additions to the berry container garden.
We added a ten pack of ever-bearing Quinalt strawberries, a three pack of Mary Washington asparagus (which will go in one of our established landscape beds), and two very nice one gallon starts- another blueberry and an ever-bearing Rubus ‘Everbearing’ raspberry.
We found the blueberry and raspberry plants at Wal-Mart for $10 each! They look extremely healthy and ready to go. They must have just received the carts and didn’t even have them displayed. In fact, the carts were full when I selected our stock.
For the strawberries, I used a regular self-watering pot and an old nursery container with the bottom cut out, buried in the center. This provides a nice two layer pot that should give the strawberries amply room to grow and hang down. They are looking good considering how they looked when they came out of the $3.98 Home Depot package.
With the warm weather forecast this week, they should have a good running start into spring…
