If you love strawberries I have found that the best place to grow them so nothing eats them and they get the best sun all day is in an old wheelbarrow. The strawberries stay clean, they can live on the back verandah or wherever you can keep an eye on the birds etc. It's also easy to keep the ants away from them. My grandchildren love to come and pick strawberries from my 'special' wheelbarrow of sweetness.
I have heard........ HEARD that if you go to the store and buy rocks and paint them red and put them amoung your plants the birds will try to eat them, and when your strawberries come up they will have given up by then. Don't know if it works but it sounds like it makes sense.
I have never grown strawberries before, I have a question. The first 2 berries to ripen within days had little trail marks across the berry where something had eaten a little path. I examined the plant and found little spider mites that were red. I looked on the internet and it said the mites will only eat leaves? My leaves are fine....whats eating my berries??
Skunks love strawberries. Last summer, the skunk ate the strawberries..cleanly eating the berry..leaving only the part of the berry that was red. Birds will peck at the berry all over and leave pokes in the berry and maybe mush on the ground beside it. Deer in my yard (until last summer when we put up a 8' fence around the garden) usually eat the whole plant and don't even leave anything to even form a berry.
I have had no problem with chipmunks or gophers eating the berries, so I'm not sure what signs you would look for then.
Strawberries love water...wheelbarrows would be wonderful containers to grow them in. One question though...overwintering...Strawberries are usually transplanted one summer and perform best the following year. Will your berry plants winter in a wheelbarrow? I live in a zone 3 and it wouldn't work here. The strawberries need more winter cover in order to make it through our lond winters. So, I plant cascading petunias in my two antique wheelbarrows and then move them from place to place in the yard all summer.
Hi! I planted strawberries along my back porch last summer, and something ate EVERY ONE of them as soon as they were ripe...Birds? Chipmunks? ...any idea how to prevent this again this summer ? I don't have a wheelbarrow,great idea though! :)
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