Tiered strawberry planter, watering?

forgotmyname

Anyone use tiered strawberry planters?

Thinking of installing some myself this year.

How do you control watering though, if we get another heatwave like last year how do you stop the top one from drying out too quickly?

What about automatic watering? Anyone tried it?

What have you tried, what worked what failed?

Thanks.

shykins

my hubby built me a 4 shelf tiered system and I plant everything in troughs (not just the strawberries).

we have an automatic timed watering system that comes on twice a day for 15minutes (ish). i fitted the drip nozzles in the top tier and the 3rd tier. then he drilled holes in all the troughs and the shelves so that excess water filters out the troughs and down to the lower shelves.

all seems to work fine although occasionally i do bung some more water on if its a particularly dry spell. in fact works so well i have a HUGE excess of strawberry plant runners planted up lol

Farway

Maybe mix water retention granules in as you plant up?

https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=692

forgotmyname

Yeah i have a few bags of the water rentention granules, used them when the strawberries were in hanging baskets. But after a really hot day they still dried up too quickly. £1 shop sell them sometimes.

Watered them 3 times in one day they dried that fast. Should have put a plastic liner on them to reduce moisture loss.

Started off with 4 varieties of strawberry plants in which one one really thrived. I have had hundreds of plants from that single one over the years.
Gardens overrun with strawberries.

Time to organise them properly and see if we can increase the yield/quality. Got a bit overcrowded now. And when you spot a monster strawberry you usually find something got there first.

How do the bugs know which are the best ones and the ones i want?