To properly prepare a site for strawberries 🍓🌱:
- Choose a sunny location: Strawberries like plenty of sun.☀️
- Prepare the soil: The soil should be fertile and well-drained, in what is known as good gardening culture. You can improve its quality by adding compost or old, weathered manure before digging it over.😊
- Check the soil pH: The optimal pH for strawberries is 5.5-6.5. If necessary, use appropriate means to adjust the pH. If there is a need to lime the soil to raise the pH, remember not to do this at the same time as applying manure; these two treatments must be separated in time.
- Get rid of weeds, especially the most troublesome ones, such as couch grass, horsetail, or thistle 🙂
Until recently, at this stage of cultivation, the widespread recommendation was to use a total herbicide called Roundup. Now Roundup (glyphosate) has become “incorrect” for various reasons, but in the absence of an alternative to this product, I recommend another way to fight couch grass and similar weeds, moreover, completely “ECO”: Just cover the area we have designated for strawberries with black PE film for a period of several or a dozen weeks (depending on the degree of soil weed infestation). Black film, as a material that does not transmit sunlight, will even combat the most troublesome weed infestation.
