Growing Glorious Gutter Gardens!

Chris with part of our 2013 strawberry harvest

Chris seriously LOVES strawberries!  We've mentioned a couple of times how in 2013, poor Chris practically broke his back by spending 6+ hours stooped over his precious strawberry patch, trying to eradicate all the evil ground ivy.

We recently came across a photo of how bad our old strawberry patch was a couple of weeks before Chris meticulously weeded it in the infamous back-breaking weeding session:

There are strawberries in there?!?

Well, so while we moved quite a lot of herbs, asparagus, and other plants to our farmhouse in 5-gallon buckets, we didn't transplant any of our strawberries just in case the entangled ground ivy hitched a ride and started invading our new yard.

So this meant that Chris has to go without homegrown strawberries this season!  To give him something to look forward to, we did buy 75 strawberry plants to get started so we can have a larger-than-ever harvest next year!  We decided to plant the strawberries in 3 different areas and see how they fare.

Regular In-Ground Planting

This is pretty self-explanatory.  Bea promises to weed the strawberries so Chris doesn't have to!  There are two varieties growing in this bed, a total of 40 plants.  This photo is taken from the porch swing we put in our main garden area, so the strawberries will be easy for us to keep an eye on every time we sit down to take a break!

Topsy Turvy Strawberry Planter

This was a present Bea gave Chris for his birthday last year after he'd mostly recovered from the back injury he acquired in his quest to save his delicious strawberries.  It's kind of a gimmick, it even says “AS SEEN ON TV" on the side of the box!  But the lure of weed-free strawberries leads us all to try some crazy things.  The planter is basically a tube of plastic that expands to hold sterile potting mix (sterile = no weeds!).  You plant the strawberries out the portals on the sides, so they grow sideways.  This planter holds 15 plants, so we have two varieties of strawberries growing in here to see how they do.  We'll update as they grow!

Gutter Gardens

The internet indicates that it's gotten pretty popular to plant strawberries in gutters!  We've never tried it before, but it seemed like a great idea to keep weeds out of the berry patch, so we're giving it a try.  We installed these in our hoophouse, where ideally weed seeds won't be blown in.  Here's how we did it:

Step 1: Acquire gutters & endcaps

Safety first!

We found some assorted & mismatched gutters for super-cheap at Community Forklift, our favorite reuse store.  I think we paid $10 for the lot of them.  The 14' sections only just barely fit in adVANture Van, with a piece of cardboard to stop the sharp metal from scratching the windshield!  We somehow got home without incident.

Definitely the modern system

We decided to use the two lengths of round gutters for this project, while we'll use the regular gutters on the sides of the hoophouse for the rain collection system.  Unfortunately though, we couldn't find round endcaps anywhere locally.  So we ordered 4 of those from guttersupply.com, and they arrived almost instantly, really fast shipping!  Chris used Bea's grandpa's antique rivet gun to attach the endcaps.  You might want to caulk the seam from the inside with waterproof caulk intended for use with gutters -- we forgot about this step but it seems to work fine, just water more often if you don't caulk it.

Step 2: Tie your knots

We debated for a really long time about the best type of knot and pulley system to use.  Ultimately, we opted to keep it super simple -- we just looped a double length of rope around the gutter, connected to itself with an overhand knot, and tossed it over the purlin of the hoophouse, no pulleys needed!  We temporarily tied a loose knot around the hip board until we could go to the hardware store to buy some cleats.

There are some really fancy ways you can connect gutters (we especially liked this one), but in our case we are going for functionality and affordability over aesthetics, and this system meets both our goals.

Step 3: Attach cleats

This is somewhat optional, but it will make it a lot easier than tying & untying knots every time you want to raise & lower your gutter garden.  Also, we wanted to keep the weight of the gutter garden off our hipboards since those will eventually be supporting the weight of water running through exterior gutters and we're a little dubious about how sturdy they are!  Since we're attaching these cleats to the metal hoops we used self-tapping metal screws.

So now your garden should look like this:

Now you're ready to plant!

Step 4: Add a layer of pea gravel

Along with many other ridiculous things we decided to move from the city, we ended up with a tub of leftover pea gravel that we knew would come in useful for something, someday.  Up north, it had been stored outdoors for a few years in a plastic container which had cracked, so as we moved it onto our dolly the thing slowly started splitting open.  To get it into the van, we had to use a couple of ratchet straps to hold everything together and prevent further breakage.  Needless to say, this was one of those times Chris says “Are you SURE we need this $#@%$#% gravel?" and Bea says “It's for your STRAWBERRIES!" and Chris says “ANYTHING for my strawberries!" and we get it loaded no matter how much of a pain in the butt it is!  Once we got it to the farmhouse, we procrastinated unloading the van for a full month, trying to forget it existed.  There were also 1,000 pounds (yes, literally) of cinder blocks that we'd moved at the same time, so that might've had something to do with it too.  adVANture Van was a hard worker!  Eventually, we shoveled the gravel into a spare trash can where it sat forgotten until we were installing this gutter garden.  But then, it was the perfect thing!

So anyway, add a layer of gravel in the bottom of your gutters.  This will improve the drainage and make sure the roots of your plants aren't sitting in pools of water.  You don't need a ton, just an inch or so.

Step 5: Add potting mix

We used a lightweight sterile potting mix and will fertilize (organically) rather than adding compost, which may contain weed seeds.  You could also use any homemade mixture of soil/compost/perlite/sand/etc but just keep in mind the weight of your system will probably double when watered, so try to aim for a lightweight mix.

Step 6: Plant!

We counted out our remaining plants (20) and measured the gutters (12' each) and did the math to space them evenly.  Strawberries should be planted 12-18" apart, so as long as you're within that range you should be OK.

Step 7: Water regularly!

Here Chris demonstrates you can either lower the gutters to waist-height to water them,
or just stand on a 5-gallon bucket.

Being able to lower the gutter gardens will definitely come in handy when it's time to harvest next year!

Grow, strawberries, grow!!!