Growing Kratky strawberries can be as easy as placing strawberry runners in a plastic container with hydroponic solution. You can also grow strawberries indoors
What are the best strawberries for hydroponic growers?
Taste aside, there are 2 main types on strawberries: everbearing and June-bearing. As a hydroponic grower you might want to have the everbearing type as they bear several crops of fruit throughout the season, unlike the June bearing that make fruits only one time per year. One plant throughout a season may produce 50 to 60 times or roughly once every three days.
Also, if you can, you should look for day-neutral varieties: strawberries actually occur in three basic flowering habits: short-day, long-day, and day-neutral. Day-neutral cultivars produce flowers regardless of the photoperiod which make them better for our led growing habits.
Things to know when growing strawberries
One thing to note, strawberries should not be started from seeds but from root stock – plants are propagated from runners and, in general, distributed as either bare root plants or plugs.
SleestaksRule has a tutorial on how you could Root Strawberries for Hydroponics from an existing plant which seems like a good choice to try. He is using Rockwoll cubes and small plastic zip bags. Using this method it takes less space and less trouble.
PH wise they like to be somewhere between 5-7, they like plenty of light but don’t like to bee too hot.
Spider mites are the most common pests for hydroponic strawberries but there are over 200 pests that can affect the strawberry plant: slugs, moths, fruit flies, chafers, strawberry root weevils, strawberry thrips, strawberry sap beetles, strawberry crown moth, mites, aphids, and others. The leaves may be infected by powdery mildew, leaf spot. The roots can also be affected by root rot.
Kratky strawberry growing
Growing strawberries using the Kratky method is very easy and cheap. You only need a plastic container, a net pot, hydroponic solution and the runners from an old plant. For indoor strawberry growing you might also need hydroponic lightning and maybe an indoor plant growing setup.
MrK 5001 has another video showing how to grow Kratky strawberries: he is transfering ozark strawberry plants from the frozen garden to a Kratky non-circulating hydroponic system. This video is about a week and a half into the trial run:
Other systems for hydroponic strawberries
Strawberry vertical hydroponics systems
Nate Storey from Bright Agrotech explains some of the reasons why Strawberries might be one of the best crops to grow hydroponically.
In the video we will see growing strawberries vertically in hydroponics systems:
Rain gutter strawberry hydroponic systems
Hoocho explains how to make a simple Nft hydroponics system for strawberries. Yes, it involves having a little more space, rain gutters, drilling holes and having pumps for the hydroponic solution, but the yields seem impressive!
Strawberry growing timelapses
This 40 days strawberry timelapse is extremely fast. Almost from the beginning the plant develops a flower. The reason is that the plant is not grown from a seedling nor an offshoot. The plant was already a year old at the time of the timelapse: it experienced a winter and dried out.
Thank you Green Timelapse for the amazing strawberry timelapse.
Thank you ZipGrow for the interesting video on hydroponic strawberries.
Engineering dads has another strawberry timelapse:
The timelapse shows how the strawberries developed during a 3 weeks period from seedling. The hydroponic solution had the following NPK values: 3% Nitrogen, 0.5% Phosphorus, 2% potassium and 2% additional trace elements.
The lightning was provided by cheap outdoor led lightning; the light was turned off for 8 hours a day to help give the plants some rest.
For pollination just give the flowers a few gentle taps. You’ll know if the pollination took when the petals fall off and it starts to darken a bit in color.
Thank you Engineering dads for the nice plant timelapse!
