Growing Strawberries

Where I grew up in Northeastern Oklahoma, strawberries were an important crop. They were so important that school started early in August so we could be out by May fifth in order to work in the strawberry harvest.

Each year, my sister would sign us up to pick. We would stand in the dark down by the highway until the crew truck picked us up. We were the only kids in the back of the truck with six or eight grown men. We would arrive at the berry farm just as the first rays of dawn were breaking above the horizon and the strawberry plants were still wet with dew.

We would get heavy wooden carriers with a dozen wooden berry quarts (nowadays they use plastic) at the berry shack. A row boss would assign us rows and we would go to work.

The strawberry plants grew in wide rows several hundred feet long. Each picker was allowed to pick from her or his side of the row, only. The row bosses carried ax handles and enforced the rules as they saw necessary. For many of the itinerant workers, getting bludgeoned was better than getting kicked off the patch and losing two weeks of work. The itinerants were usually entire families living in their car and following the harvest from one crop to the next. In 1963, at six cents a quart, a hard worker could make about eight dollars a day. It was important for them to make a year's income during six months of picking.

Often, an area that had been picked the week before would need to be gleaned. You had to cover a lot more ground to pick the same amount of berries. The traveling pickers hated that. It would cut a mans daily pay to less than four dollars, because we got paid by the quart. And, since we were picking for a frozen food company, we had to remove the caps from the berries, which is not as easy as it sounds. Buy a box of berries at the store and use your thumbnail to pop the cap off of every berry. Now imagine doing that non-stop for twelve hours a day.

When it got too dark to pick, we climbed aboard the crew truck and went home. This was in the years before sunscreen. In spite of wearing long sleeves and pants, a bandanna and floppy hat, at the end of the first week we were usually so sunburned and sun sick that we had to drop out of the harvest.

In spite of all that, I still love strawberries. I've never gotten serious about growing them myself, and the few times I put in a plant or two, the box turtles beat me to the berries.

Last year I decided to try growing strawberries from seed. It wasn't easy getting them started and at the end of the summer I had two plants.

It is recommended that you pick the blossoms off the plants at first to let them get established before they fruit. After awhile, my plants were blooming faster than I could keep up with and I just let it go and got to eat some berries before the freeze.

This spring I transplanted the plants to one of my seventeen gallon containers and they have filled it to overflowing. For once I'm going to have a small but steady supply of strawberries right at home. If I can keep the squirrels and raccoons away.

Stephen P.