Stand Up Berry Patch

Stand up berry patch AG WORLD Ag World 16-5-25 An rural Iowa couple, who have operated a pick-your-own berry farm for the past nine years, have found that they can squeeze more than an acre's worth of plants onto a new 1/5th acre plot by growing strawberries in stacks of pots. The best part is that they no longer have to bend over to pick the berries. Marc and Diane Bock of Lone Tree, Iowa, had no model available to follow in starting their new berry-growing system so they've been experimenting with different methods as they go along. The plot is 80 by 35 ft. and contains a space-age looking network. of white foam pots stacked 7 ft.-high, all hooked together by irrigation hoses, cables and wires. The plot contains 8,800 plants in 220, 10-pot stacks. That's about 1,800 more plants than you would find on a 1-acre conventional strawberry patch. The plants are automatically fed a mixture of water and nutrients by tubes which directly feed each stack of pots. They continually monitor the level of fertilization and take regular leaf tissue tests to check the health of plants. The biggest benefit of the controlled feeding set-up that the pot system allows is that they eventually hope to triple the length of the berry picking season, which normally lasts just one month. Setting up the hydroponic system was not cheap. The Bocks figure they invested $7,000 to $8,000. This year they experimented with 3 different varieties of "day neutral" berries to see which would perform best in pots. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Mark Bock, Bock's Berry Farm, Lone Tree, Iowa 52755 (ph 319 629-5553).

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