Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

hey

ya gotta do what ya gotta do.... dont have to be pretty to work

jT

Lov'n the yield of strawberries out form the towers this year! Nobody in the area has anything ready this early.....except me!

Could you please give a quick but detailed description of your current strawberry tower setup? Thanks

The first page of this thread has some good pics of the towers. Also you can see them in the video in the link down at the bottom. Let me know if you have any questions!

Howdy Rob,

I was wondering what your strawberry yeild is from the towers. I'm trying to figure out if it will be feesable to grow enough for jam making.

Thanks
MArk

D'uh! Depends on how much jam you want....

CB

This year I'm keeping an official count of the berries. The problem is for jam, you need a bunch all at once so it's usually easier to got to a pick-your-own farm. I have around 60 plants and I'm picking a handful every few days.

I'm have a bunch of everbearing variety which I'm not happy with. They are small berries and don't produce at the same time. I also have some that I got from my parents that have been handed down for several generations. These do really well in the greenhouse and produce big berries. After this season I'm going to get rid of the everbearing and replace them with these other ones.

My guess would be you would need a couple hundred plants to get enough berries at one time to make a batch of jam.......

Or you could freeze the small harvest(s) until you have enough and then defrost and make your jam

A few hundred is probably a good guess. We went out to an orchard today and pick maybe 1/2 bushel in an hour. I'm sure we visited at least a few hundred plants...but then again they are picked over several times a day - so as my kids are fond of saying - you get what you get and you don't throw a fit. The best I will probably do in the greenhouse would be 16-20 5 foot towers.

C1 is right though - freeze them until getting enough. After picking today I was talking to mom (happy motherday call) and told her I was just tuckered out and not feeling like making jam. She said she does it all the time - clean them and tosses them in the freezer and cans them the next day. So perhaps 20 towers might yied enough for a few jars a year.

Thanks
Mark

I took a few more pics of my strawberries and wrote a bit in my blog....

http://web4deb.blogspot.com/2010/05/str ... pdate.html

Enjoying the first cukes of the season out of the greenhouse. They're growing like crazy! I haven't even planted seeds in the outdoor garden yet!

Also found this baby giant walking stick in there.

The cucs & berries look awesome!

...thanks for the update, I'm thoroughly enjoying this thread.

Official strawberry count of the season:

65 plants
679 berries
85.78 ounces (2.4 kilos)
~ 19 cups

Many of the berries were small because the majority of plants were everbearing. I have a few other plants that had some huge sweet berries and will take the runners from them and get rid of the everbearing.

Overall a good experiment. The funny part is I'm done with the season and I just got a message from the local orchard that their pick-your-own field is now open. They only have about 50,000 plants there.

were all 65 plants in your towers? or some in GBs also?

Thats an impressive amount of strawberries.