Very interesting! Ill consider it in the future, for my current growing situation I just used a pre made mix for convenience sake. Thanks!
Update around 3 months from starting out. Quite a few lessons I’ve learned. The first being that no matter the brand, sterilize your soil for indoor use, even if it says it’s designed for houseplants. Ive had a terrible soil mite problem and while it doesn’t have any effects on the plants, there are probably 100s roaming around in my grow bags. I’ve tried everything to take care of them, neem, horticultural oil, insecticidal soap etc but all have failed. It brings down the numbers for a week or two but then they bounce right back (even if i apply them on a regular basis). Unfortunately, the very regular spray schedule (even after washing the sprays off afterwards) had lead to the demise of or at least greatly halted the growth of just about every plant…that is except the beast below:
Its a hawaii 4 alpine. Its managed to put out about 65 strawberries/flowers/buds over the last few weeks and doesnt look like its slowing down. In addition its managed to throw out about 30 runners (which also produce strawberries on them immediately). So far I’ve only tried one berry which was underripe so the flavor was just okay. I’m looking forward to trying several more over the next few days.
In any case, I’m going let some more of the berries ripen and then swap everything over to hydroponics. I started a hydroponic trial a few weeks ago and I have been very impressed with the results. Between that, easier maintenance and less pests, it seems like the right next move.
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Are the soil mites beneficial to the soil?
Can you post pics of your growing setup? The tent and the lights. Your strawberries look like they have made great progress- I’m surprised you already have fruit.
The mites can be beneficial as they break down soil, but they’re known to really enjoy peat moss which is the primary ingredient in my potting mix. This explains the explosion of the mite population. I had a plastic pot in the grow tent at one point that made it extremely easy to identify the mites and they were crawling all over the pot. While I don’t mind insects, I do not want to move my pots only to find my hand has mites on them (which did happen several times).
I was extremely surprised by the rate of growth as well especially considering how much I put this plant through (all of the leaves were wilted and half dead when I first started my spraying regimen). The tent looks a bit bare right now because I already transferred all of the pineapple crush, Bowlenzauber, yellow wonder and reine de vallees to my hydroponic set up in a separate part of the apartment. Ive been ravenously pulling off runners on the Hawaii 4 and somehow a few days later theres always more to take off. Given how aggressive this plant has been in growth habit, fruit production and runners, I decided to start propagating the runners which you can see in the photo. I’ve been pulling the flowers off of the propagated runners since I want them to have strong root growth prior to being moved into my hydroponic system.
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Do the strawberries need any sort of dormancy to reset and produce fruit? Or will they produce year round if kept indoors and under lighting?
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I ended up moving them to another system. They were producing dozens and dozens of flowers every day, hand pollinating them simply took too much time. I broke up the clumps and moved them to a generic aerogarden system but they have continued to put out flowers continuously. It’s been around 4-5 months since they started flowering and they don’t seem to be slowing down but I’ve read that outside strawberry plants require removal of mother plants every ~3 years or the production goes down. I’d imagine since mine continuously produce fruit that would shorten their heavy fruit producing life span but since they are of the clumping variety you can always divide them for “new” strawberry plants.
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