There are tens of thousands of acres of strawberries planted every year in California — although berries are technically a semi-perennial crop, they are grown here as annuals. Despite the scale of this task, though, it’s an old-fashioned process, as no effective berry-planting machine has been invented. The plants themselves, called crowns, are leafless bundles of mostly roots that are grown in “nursery fields”, dug up with specialized machines, and packed tightly into boxes. When we plant them in our fields, they have to be carefully placed in the soil so that the roots aren’t exposed to air, but neither is the plant base buried. The beds are covered in plastic mulch, which protects the plants from weeds and also serves to keep the fruit from sitting in the dirt. Holes are punched in the plastic with a tractor implement that also creates a deep divot in the soil below. But the rest is done by human hands, one delicate plant at a time.
Most of the berries grown in Northern California are planted during the winter, then grow and are harvested through the spring and summer. But at Terra Firma, we have to plant in late summer. The plants grow through the Fall before going dormant in the winter. That gives us a headstart in the spring, which is important for our relatively short season. We need big plants to provide shade from the hot sun.
We plant our strawberry field every year aroud the 1st of September, depending on the weather. We can’t plant on days when it’s going to be too hot, because the bare roots can’t be exposed to temperatures over 95 degrees. And we usually stop planting at noon. We keep the drip irrigation under the plastic mulch running during the planting process, so the soil stays constantly damp.
For all these reasons, when we plant our berries, it’s all hands on deck. Even though our little berry patch is only 3 or 4 acres most years, it takes 15 or 20 people to get it done in a timely fashion. With all the other work we have going on here, it can be hard to find the time to make it happen.
Still, there are years when heat takes its toll. The crowns take about a week to start pushing out leaves, and during this time they are very sensitive to sunburn. It takes at least two weeks for the plants to be able to start shading themselves. Even if have nice weather for planting, a heatwave too soon after will cook the plants. We’ve had years where we had to replant up to 25% of the field as a result.
This year, for the first time I can remember, we won’t be worrying about heat. it’s like someone picked the farm up and moved it 50 miles closer to the coast. It’s been cool, cloudy and breezy since Monday, and the temperature tomorrow — when we’ll start planting the berries — is not expected to break 75 degrees. To put that in perspective for those readers who may think of that as “normal”: our average high temperature for early September is 93, and exactly one week ago the high temperature was 100. We had nights in August when the low temperature was in the 70s.
We also don’t have to worry about making enough time. “Thanks” to the chilly-for-us weather, most of our summer crops have slowed way down in their ripening. We’ll have two consecutive days this week where everyone on the farm will be available, and we can plant berries all day. In the 30 years we’ve been growing strawberries, that has never happened before.
If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you know that we occasionally get lucky and see a small crop of ripe berries in October or November. A lot of things have to go right for that to happen, but if they do, you may get a basket in your box in six or eight weeks.
Thanks,
Pablito