Strawberries From Farm to Fork

Welcome to my page all about strawberries! Here you will find information taking you from the farm all the way to your fork. This will include tried and true recipes, planting, and harvesting tips for all things strawberries.

Quick Links to Strawberry Topics on this Page:

• Favorite Strawberry Recipes
• Guide for Measuring Strawberries
• Starting a New Strawberry Patch
• Getting the Soil Ready for a New Strawberry Patch
• Maintenance for a Strawberry Patch
• Harvesting Strawberries from your Backyard Strawberry Patch
• Preserving and Keeping Strawberries Fresh

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The best part of raising your own farm-fresh strawberries is the sweet taste of sun-ripened berries. You can’t buy that in the grocery store! Speaking of taste, let’s get right to our favorite freshly picked strawberry recipes.

Favorite Strawberry Recipes

Before I get into the recipes it’s important to know how many strawberries you will need for any given recipe. The graphic below helps for anyone that might be confused with converting quarts and pints to cups and decided just how many berries you need to pick. The answer to that last question is more because more is better.

Guide for measuring strawberries:

Now that we have that settled, on to my strawberry recipe favs…

Starting a New Strawberry Patch

Have you ever taken a trip to a local strawberry patch flourishing with juicy red berries and thought, I could totally do this at home? Just me? Well, we did, and our first attempt wasn’t quite so successful. You win some, you lose some, I guess. This summer we attempted to try it again. And I thought I would tell you some things that didn’t work the first time around and what we learned along the way.

I requested that the farmer of the house help me create a small patch of strawberries for our family to enjoy. Well, “small” was misinterpreted; we ended up with a large patch. This first time around we had a very pretty patch with lots of green and some strawberries, but not many, and they were not sweet and didn’t taste very good. The culprit was not enough sunlight.

This was very discouraging and I was about to call it, but instead one Saturday in March, inspired by the beautiful weather, we enlisted our free farm helpers to move the patch. Again, before we began I requested a small patch, and again it got even bigger! Barton motto in effect again: more is better.

Getting the Soil Ready for the New Strawberry Patch

Our new patch location was just field grass, so it first had to be tilled up. If you don’t have a tiller you can rent one fairly inexpensively at Home Depot. When you start from grass you will probably be battling it wanting to come back for a while. We transplanted the strawberry plants in rows, but honestly, they will travel all over the place once they take off. We transplanted extra strawberry plants here just in case all the plants didn’t make the transfer.

We put cow manure for fertilizer around all the plants and then mulched over the rows up to the plants. The neighbors must have sniffed us out, they were observing us over the fence.

Maintenance for a Strawberry Patch

The grass will keep trying to come up, so basically, we were out there every couple of days and weeding stray grass and weeds that were attempting to choke the plants out. Also, strawberries need a lot of water to craft their juicy sweetness, so watering often is a must.

We added a soaker hose to make watering a little easier and more efficient, and also some fencing around the patch to keep the critters out. We were hoping to keep it open for ease of picking, weeding and watering, but the deer were stopping for a snack, tromping over the plants, and getting tangled in the soaker hoses.

Harvesting Strawberries from your backyard patch

Many newly planted strawberry plants will not bear fruit the first year, but we got more than a few pickings of strawberries our first year. This was more than expected from transplants, and we are hoping this next year is an abundantly fruitful one.

With a well-maintained patch, you will have several pickings throughout the growing season on the order of 1-2 quarts of fruit per strawberry plant. Strawberries won’t ripen off the vine, so be sure to pick them when they are a bright red color, and leave the ones with white tops or tips on the plant to ripen further.

Preserving and Keeping Strawberries Fresh

Strawberries taste best freshly picked, but will also keep if refrigerated. They will taste sweeter if you let them come to room temperature before eating. If you have too many berries to consume before they will go bad, make some jam! Or if you don’t have time for jam, strawberries freeze well. You can enjoy freezer fresh strawberries all year long in smoothies, muffins, added to oatmeal, strawberry sauce, or strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Hopefully, I’ve inspired you to start your very own backyard strawberry patch, or maybe you’re satisfied with just reading about mine today. Either way, I’ll leave you with this silly dirt mustache photo.

Blog Posts about Hobby Farming

Check out the blog for more information about what’s new at Barton Craft & Barn including the following post about our hobby farming experiences.

Just Getting Started Gardening?

I put together a list of my top garden tools to help the newbie get the needed gardening essentials. If you are getting started gardening, or want to be more prepared this season, check out the printable in my free resource library for my favorite garden tools to get your gardening on. Hope you enjoy!