Strawberries are a specialty at Jessica and Robert Bittner's six-acre farm, Bayside Gardens, where 10,000 strawberry plants grow fat in the clay loam soil of the Jacoby Creek flood plain. Peeling back a flap of white row cover, Jessica plucks a warm red berry lying on a sheet of black plastic. The plastic keeps the berries clean and the row cover keeps the birds and the dew off the plants. Black plastic is used for mulch and drip irrigation lines installed down the center of each row keeps plants well-watered all summer long. Even with these modern aids, growing strawberries is a lot of work.
Strawberries require intense hand labor.
In the spring season they've been gone through and cleaned twice. The berries need to be picked twice a week because they are ripening that fast. Bittner uses no pesticides on the berries and instead relies on a large flock of ducks and chickens to keep slugs, sowbugs and earwigs from ruining the fruit. Handpicking slugs that hide beneath the black plastic mulch is necessary. The slugs get a certain percentage of the crop, but it's sort of a live and let live situation.