Field notes: SAKURA and HARUHI go into the vertical pots at Igatpuri

Date: September 14 Place: Our partner HiMedia’s greenhouse in Igatpuri, Maharashtra Cultivars: SAKURA and HARUHI

In June we stood over the nursery trays at Igatpuri and counted what had germinated. On September 14 the plants that came through that stage — both of our Japanese cultivars, SAKURA and HARUHI — took the next step: out of the trays and into the pots where they will actually grow.

Into the vertical pots

The greenhouse is set up with vertical pots — columns of interlocking white foam pots, stacked so that every pot faces outward and catches light. We wrote about why we grow off the ground and under cover earlier on this journal. Transplanting day is where that system starts to fill up.

Each seedling was lifted from its tray with the root plug intact and set into a pot of coir-based media, crown level with the surface — deep enough for the roots to take hold, never so deep that the crown is buried. A black drip line runs into every pot, and a small emitter sits at the base of each plant, so water and nutrients arrive exactly where the young roots are.

Look at the size of the plant against the pot: three or four true leaves, a plug of roots, not much else. That is what a strawberry crop looks like on day one. The stacks of pots around it, hundreds of them in tidy rows, are what it is meant to become.

What comes next

The next few weeks are about establishment — roots spreading out of the plug and into the media, new leaves opening, the plant deciding that this pot is home. Once the plants have settled in, they are grown on toward flowering and, eventually, the first berries of the season. SAKURA and HARUHI behave a little differently from each other — that is part of why we grow both — and we will keep walking these rows and reporting what we find, the good days and the difficult ones alike.

Growing from seed to a plant in its final pot is a long road, and September 14 was one of the milestones on it. The pots are planted. Now the season begins.

ICHIGO® is the premium strawberry brand of Vegibus India. Field notes are our running record from the nursery and the field — the unpolished part of growing a Japanese-standard strawberry in India.