Space is something that we are not short on here at The Farm Cradle Country Tasmania, however when planting out our veggie garden we wanted to use all of the space available to us, which included going up as well as out.

Strawberries are a favourite here in our household, fresh, baked or chocolate dipped there is always strawberries on our menu come Springtime.
Here is Tasmania the seasons change a little slower than our mainland friends with the morning frosts only just having ceased, we have only just planted out our Strawberry runners and its already the beginning of October (man, how this year has flown by).
There are so many reasons to consider planting your spring strawberries vertical. First and foremost your Strawberries won’t get waterlogged on the ground, they won’t get smashed into the ground by native animals or pets and your berries will naturally hang meaning beautiful clean fresh berries every time.

For our vertical strawberry garden we have chosen to use guttering in 3.6m sections. The poles to the structure of our patch are 3ms apart which leaves a small section on 300mm hanging over each end and provides an easy place to secure the guttering to the poles. Being we spanned over such a large space we also dug in a middle shorter pine pole to secure the centre of the gutter ensuring it wouldn’t warp when filled. If you wanted shorter runs of gutter for your own vertical garden then you could omit the additional pole.

Its important when using guttering the you drill tiny holes along the length of the guttering to ensure that the excess water has a place to escape. It’s true that Strawberries love water and the fastest way to kill your strawberry plants is to let them dry out, however they definetly don’t like to be drowned either.

We chose a variety of Strawberries this year. Melba is an Australian bred Strawberry and known for its large fruit. Red Gauntlet which is a popular commercial variety, is heavy cropping and gives a medium sized fruit and lastly Big Sweetie which claims to produce an abundance of medium sized juicy and delicious fruit.