Aquaponics - Strawberries!

Strawberries!

I love strawberries.


And always get a little excited when I see the flowers.


I've been buying just one of each variety when I see them for sale to see what does well in aquaponics.  The very first plant I put in didn't do so well and died back, almost as far as it could before being called dead, but it's runners have all established and now all have flowers and fruit.


Strawberry plants get old and stop producing after a few years, so perhaps I bought an old plant. It was from a market stall so who knows what it was.


I've also bought a variety with, it turns out, a pink flower. I didn't know strawberries did that. This variety seems to be called Fragaria.

The other things I didn't know include the fact that strawberries are not really fruit. 


From what I can gather, the fruit is a fruit holder, and the fruit are these little pink protrusions that I think are flowers, or some other form of reproductive bit, and end up as a seed containing ovaries of the flower.


In a house I lived in as a kid, there was an uncared for strawberry patch that we discovered was full of hidden little strawberries that we would spend lots of fun time searching through.


These fond memories, and the fact that there were never enough of them are, I think, the driving force behind wanting to grow a lot of strawberries. Fresh home picked strawberries also make a very nice thing to be able to take to someone's house if you are dropping in for for dinner.


Grow some strawberries. Heaps of them. Kids love them and so do grown-ups. They don't take a lot of care, and if you grow them in aquaponics, they take even less. Just pull out any plants that stop fruiting when they get old. Or better yet, pull out last years and put them out to pasture in a wild patch in the corner of your back yard. 


They like plenty of water when starting out and when fruiting, don't like salt much, and the biggest threat to them is slugs and children. I believe they also like a pH closer to pH 6, but seem to cope with between pH 5.5 and pH 7.5, but found this difficult to nail down. It might just be different varieties prefer different conditions.