As you know, I received my Burpee.com order of 25 barefoot or bare-root strawberry plants in the Seascape variety. Seascapes are a day neutral variety that produce fruit in about 90 days. I planted them all in little seedling cups and put them on trays. Last night it was a bit cold in the sun room so I moved them to the basement opened the curtain and wrapped a towel around the trays. When I woke up I noticed the a few plants had the roots showing so I carried them upstairs back into the sun room and started adding a little extra potting mix. It was sunny and warm out so I placed the trays outside in the sunniest spot in the yard and watered them a little bit just to moisten the dirt I'd added. At this point I had noticed a little green poking out of most of the crowns that used to be all brown. So that was good... I could tell most had survived the trip from PA.
I headed back down into the basement to work on a makeshift green house to protect the plants from the afternoon wind pick up. Every afternoon the wind really has been picking up and if the sun is out it seems to take over and make it chillier by at least 10 degrees. So I wanted to get the greenhouse cover structure over the strawberries before that happened so that the sun could warm the interior sufficiently before the wind picked up.
It was a lot harder to get this thing together then I thought it would be. I used a bunch of leftover vacuum seal type bags, cut up a plastic bag that used to hold a mattress cover (that thick very glass-like plastic), and used a white garbage bag for the top. For the frame I cut up strips of cardboard and used wooden paint mixers. To hold everything together I used a stapler, black tape, and clear tape. The sides of the structure held up pretty well it was the top I had trouble with because I didn't put a frame around it. Once I had completed the greenhouse cover I carried it outside and placed it over the two strawberry trays. It worked well enough! I took a look inside and noticed that about 15 out of the 27 plants (Burpee sent 2 extra) had grown over the last few hours in the sun. A few had a 1 inch stem and leaf, some of the growth was just poking out of the crowns, and some had a miraculous 2 inch steam and a full size leaf. It was pretty, pretty, pretty good! Now I knew that, at least, 15 made the trip alive. Yesterday I had no clue whether one of them had made it to me alive. They just looked so sad and pathetic. Seeing that growth renewed my confidence in my garden. Even though the seedlings I planted still haven't shown any real progress and the sweet potatoes are just growing in a few long but very thin roots seeing those strawberries bloom basically overnight made it all worth it. The strawberries are the plant I'd been looking most forward too.
I just stood there and stared for a few minutes. Although I was excited to see the growth I wasn't surprised. I'd Google search "growing barefoot/root strawberries" last night and saw a few videos that made it clear that the plants should show growth in the first 24-48 hours because strawberry plants grow quickly. That is the exact reason I was so renewed by the growth... because I was expecting it. I needed them to work out because almost everything else hasn't so far. I'm very excited to see that at least 1/2 of the plants are alive and sprouting. I hope that all 27 will have new growth by tomorrow afternoon but if they don't I'll contact Burpee and ask them to send me 10 new plants. I'm happy either way . I'm happy with the growth and without because I have the time to try again and don't have to pay for the second attempt.
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