FARMINGTON – David Pike picked his first quart of strawberries on May 31 at his farm just off Route 4.
Now in his 33rd year of business, Pike is continually looking for ways to improve his crop, lengthen the growing season and protect his plants through the harsh Maine winter.
For the past four years, he has used a plasticulture system or plastic mulch. The strawberries are planted in raised beds covered with black plastic mulch to warm the soil in early spring. The black mulch also keeps weeds from growing. Irrigation tubes run through the beds to deliver moisture in high heat and can also deliver fertilizer and nutrients to the plants and even predator nematods to kill any pests.
Through the winter, Pike protects the plants with a floating row cover.
“Not many are doing it this way, but I think in time people will. You get a bigger crop and they’re easier to pick,” Pike said
“He’s a solid two weeks, almost three weeks, ahead of the normal schedule,” said David Handley, small fruit specialist with the UMaine Cooperative Extension.
On Tuesday, Handley and others with Extension’s Highmoor Farm in Monmouth were at Pike’s property to collect data.
Plasticulture is more widely used in the southern states, which plant in the fall and have a naturally longer growing season. It is rarely seen in New England because with the shorter growing seasons and resulting lower production, the higher cost of materials didn’t make sense, Handley said.
To make it work, growers in the North must plant earlier. The drawback to this is that the strawberry plants grow more runners, which suck the nutrients away from the plant.
“It’s a day length response,” Handley said. Southerners plant when the days are shorter and the runners do not grow.
Handley is working with Pike to reduce the number of runner plants. The runners have to be removed by hand, which is labor intensive. They are testing different varieties of plants as well as growth regulators.
“We are reaching our goal to make this as profitable if not more than the old system,” Handley said.
On four-tenths of an acre, Pike has planted 25 varieties of strawberries to see which yields the highest production. Along with others, he is trying plants from Canada as well as some from the Carolinas that will produce until the first freeze.
“Some varieties aren’t even named yet,” he said.
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