Strawberries

The Story

OzBF grows our strawberries on tabletops which means you can pick and we can maintain the plants without a lot of bending over.  Our new growing method is still in trial mode but we have expanded an additional 880 plants making it about 1600 plants total.  We hope to continue expanding.  In the first year, we had a good spring crop and the Albion produced all the way through to the first frost of fall 2021.  In July 2021 we ran into problems with a fruit fly and yellowjackets and halted u pick but continued to experiment with the trial learning along the way.  In the Spring of 2022, we focused on having just a spring crop, thus avoiding the summer critters of July.  This has worked very well overcoming one hurdle.  The next issue that came up this year is the ability to winter over with less damage to the fruiting crowns.  In the 2022/23 winter, we decided to try it again hoping for better production. Well, wintering over was a bust. Between some really cold weather and mistakes we made the berries did not fare well for 2023. So we will try again in 2024 with a new approach.

​

OzBf is one of just a couple farms doing out-of-doors tabletop strawberries in MO and has been working with and sharing information with University of Minnesota strawberry researchers.