Growing Backyard Strawberries for Wine

Most people don't think of strawberries as something to grow for wine, but it can be done. My brother in law has a strawberry patch that produced 13 gallons of wine last year, it's pretty crazy. The patch goes down a fence row and is about 200 ft long x 4 ft wide. Last year he made 13 gallons of wine from the strawberry patch shown in the photos. He grows June bearing only, so you just get a single, somewhat monstrous harvest. The wine is good too, very fruity.

Fruit Garden Update - Things are getting started

Black Raspberries are exploding - the harvest this year will be better than I anticipated

Blackberries - Strong canes, lots of potential berries 

Blueberries - good growth thus far, nothing special though

Grapes - All vines are budding, little baby clusters are present on each shoot

Strawberries - Seems to be choked out by weeds/grass - considering a makeover for that bed

Hops - about 4 feet high, crazy growth

Planning up uploading a ton of pics tomorrow

2011 Backyard Fruit Projections

I thought it would be interesting to estimate how much fruit I could potentially yield in the 2011 growing season and then translate that into potential wine.


Blackberry Crowns
 - Blackberry crowns yield potential is difficult to project. Crop estimates from 6 to 46 pounds per plant have been reported for triple crown blackberries. I find it difficult to believe any more than 5 pounds each could come off of my canes, so I will estimate at 4 pounds per planted blackberry bush - 20 total pounds

Blueberry Bushes
- My bushes are too young to produce fruit -- or anything worth accounting for if it does.

Black Raspberry Bush
- My single bush should yield between 1-2 pounds(will be blended with blackberry)

Grapes
- Of my 20 backyard grapevines, I will have only 12 being 4th year vines. From each of these vines, I will estimate half of optimal harvest, due to growth status thus far, which would be roughly 8 pounds. I would get 96 pounds of fruit by these projections.


Total - 4th year projections

Grapes - 96 lbs / 15 lbs per gallon =  6.4 gallons = 30-35 bottles
 Berries(all combined) = 22-25 lbs total / 4 = 5(ish) gallons = 20-25 bottles

Bottles of finished wine goal for 2011: 50-60 bottles

Winter Pruning Berry Canes

I thought this was a pretty good tutorial on pruning berry canes.

http://www.graspr.com/videos/Properly-Pruning-Raspberries-Blackberries-1

My Fruit Garden Layout

I was playing around in google documents, I was able to make this picture pretty easily of what an overhead view of my fruit garden would look like. Between each row is 6 feet, which is enough to get a riding mower through with ease.

 

The Blueberries - Fall planting 2010

  

This is a new addition to the backyard garden, five bluecrop blueberry bushes.  I wasn't really planning on adding any blueberries to the garden but I saw these at Lowes for 5 bucks a piece so I pulled the trigger.

Mature Bluecrop blueberry bushes can yield 10-15 pounds of fruit per year, so the full wine making potential of 5 mature bushes would equate to 50-75 total pounds of fruit. Each gallon of wine required 3 pounds of fruit bringing the total amount of gallons to 16-25, which equals 80-125 bottles. In terms of finished wine these are some pretty substantial statistics in my opinion. I hope these numbers are accurate. The trade off for harvest potential is the maturity period of 5 years.

These are fairly pathetic looking at this point just after being planted and mulched.

The Raspberry bush

I have but a single raspberry bush which yield a handful of fruit this year due to some pruning mistakes. It is a 3 year old bush that went crazy this summer and had to be pruned throughout the summer to fit the space I'm allowing for this plant. My opinion on growing a plant that will try to constantly expand in a small garden is to simply not allow it too, I vigorously trim them back before it gets out of hand..which it can surprisingly quickly. This bush ended up being a black raspberry instead of red.