Growing Strawberries

To say I have a green thumb wouldn’t be an exaggeration, it would be an outright lie. However I have 2 kids under 5 that would go through a punnet of strawberries every 2 days and therefore I decided it was about time to start growing some strawberries.

Having never grown anything before in my life (does grass count?) I decided to do some internet research to give the strawberries the best chance of survival.

With strawberries you need to have well drained soil, ideally planted in late winter/early spring, and when they start to fruit, you can’t have the strawberries touching the wet soil. Well I managed to have the correct set up and the strawberries began to grow. The kids ate the strawberries and we all lived happily ever after.

Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out that way. It turns out that my kids aren’t the only ones that like strawberries. I found out that growing them wasn’t a problem. It was stopping the local wildlife from eating them that was the main issue.

I got frustrated, I needed to reset and refocus my energy on fixing the problem. My method for growing strawberries was fine so hopefully just some slight tweaks to my strategy to keep the birds away would provide me with the outcome I was after.

My mother in law told me that birds do not like shiny things. Taking her advice my wife and I put foil over the planters and hung foil strips across the front of the plants to try and scare away the birds. Would you believe it, it worked! For about 2 months I had delicious strawberries grown from my own garden.

The strawberry plants have since grown considerably and they now cover up the foil strips and the birds are back to eating the strawberries before I can get out there and pick them. Once again I need to reset and refocus and solve another problem. The next thing I am going to try is bird spikes that will hopefully keep them far away so the kids and I can go back to enjoying our home grown strawberries.

Whether it’s growing strawberries, losing weight, investing or any other goal there will always be hiccups and challengers along the way. It’s important not to give up, refocus on the end goal, reset your strategy, keep what’s working and change what’s not. If you keep with it, I can guarantee you’ll be in a better position than you would be if you would have simply given up.

– Liam Rutty –