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Video: How to Plant Bare Root Strawberries in Hanging Baskets
Video Transcript
Hello, I¡¯m Donna Emery from Glover Nursery in West Jordan, Utah. We're going to plant strawberries in a hanging basket. This one is a fiber formed basket that has holes pre-cut in it. But we're going to use a moss lined basket and cut our own holes. I've cut most of them but I'm just going to take a box knife and make a little v-shaped cut. Not too large because I don't want to lose my soil. It's not at all difficult to do with a box knife. I've got it filled about half full with soil. Now I'm going to take my bare root strawberries. I've been soaking them for a few minutes in this little bowl. You can soak them half an hour or an hour if you'd like. It has the little shoot, some dead stems and these roots. I want to clean it up just a little so I can see what I'm doing. There we go. Right up here at the top is what's called a crown. You can see these little leaf like structures here that seem to be holding the stem of the strawberry onto the roots. You want this crown right at the surface of the soil. Now if this had really long roots I could trim them off a bit. Especially these that are going to go into the sides of the basket. Here's where I cut a hole, right there, and I'm going to insert this, making a little hole for it here on the other side. Spreading the roots out and making sure the crown is just right at the edge of that liner. Let me find where I've cut another one. Here's another one. Locate where that crown is right where the shoot meets the root. And since my basket is right now only half full of soil it's not hard to get these in there. This one's got a lot of stems on it so I'm going to trim those back. The little dead things come up the root a little bit. Where did that go? There we are. Looks like I didn't make one right there so I'll make another slit, a little v-shaped hole right there. Then I'm going to start filling the top. And I'm going to need more soil for the top of it. Okay I have it nearly filled with potting soil so I'll keep going with my little roots. Put one here in the center. I'm digging down deep enough that I don't have to bunch these roots out. I want them to spread out so I'm going to let them spread out. This one's kind of messy so I'm going to trim it up. I'm placing these, oh about, three or four inches apart in this basket. They could go a little bit closer together. Plants planted in containers are almost always planted closer than they would be in the garden. I think I'll make that one my last one. I have six on the top and about four or five around the edges. Since bare root strawberries usually come in packages of 10 to 12 that's just about right to fill a hanging container. All I need to do now is water it thoroughly. I can add some fertilizer maybe in a week or two but I want to let them settle in before I do that. I want to be sure that I'm leaving an inch or so of space between the soil and the top of the basket so that there's room for water to puddle. And here's the finished product. Strawberries in a hanging basket. I just have to attach the hanger, put it in a sunny warm space outdoors, a deck or a patio, and I'll have strawberries soon. Thanks for watching.
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