Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

im growing strawberries in an aquaponics class at school. what are some good tips and techniques for growing big strawberries that taste good?

You have made the right move theres not much else to do

Make sure you have no salt in the water - makes it difficult to treat fish problems though.

Add a bit of seasol/maxicrop weekly, and make sure the plants get plenty of direct sunlight for a couple of hours a day.

I'd say don't go for big strawberries.
The ones from the supermarket are basically a red granny smith apple IMO.
Get some heirloom strawbs from digger's club or similar - small, intensely sweet.
Who cares if you have to bite into twice aas many berries if thay taste three times as good?

With you there Uncle Yarra bigger is not always better with strawberries. I suggest to try a few varieties to see which ones you like the best.

I totally agree the varieties in the shops are sour. they are grown for size, transport ability, and pest resistance. taste is about another 5 other factors below those again.
mine are all comming on now and the taste difference is unreal.

Plenty of water, plenty of sun.

Planting strawberries in NFT pipes.

Any tips on how to get the roots nicely fanned out through the net pots? When I get strawberry sets they usually already have a pretty good size root mass and I'm not sure how best to go about placing them into an NFT section of the system.

The roots will fan out through the pots by themselves TCL...

Rupe,
I expect that new roots will grow out nicely but I don't want to wad up the existing roots into a coil just to get them into the 2" net pot. Most strawberry sets I've ever gotten had 6 to 8 inch roots so even keeping the crown totally above the pot, that still leaves me with 3 or more inches of root mass to put some where. How do people usually deal with planting NFT strawberry plants into the system, anyone got a description of the planting process or pictures? All the planting instructions I've ever seen for strawberries make a big deal about fanning out the roots and making sure they are not curled up.

Ok.... in all honesty... I've never tried to pot something with roots that long into NFT...

You could try cutting out the bootom of the pot ...

Or .... go for a bigger pot...

I guess I'll have to do some research on how the professional strawberry growers do it then since I've seen plenty of strawberries in NFT pipes.

They probably grow from seedling plugs... rather than "crowns"...

These ones aren't even potted... just straight into the tray..

I would trim the roots and dunk them in seaweed extract diluted in water to reduce the transplant shock. They don't look back.