Strawberry Plugs

Those of you who are long time newsletter readers will recall that we have been involved in the effort to transition organic strawberry growers into using organically grown starts. The problem we are facing now is that virtually no organically grown planting stock is currently available and the standards allow growers to use non-organic plants when their organic counterparts aren’t available. To make a long story short, there was an organic plant nursery (Prather Ranch) that grew beautiful plants for a four year period between 2005-2009. During the last two seasons they were available, we used their plants exclusively and were very happy with them. The problem was that while the small growers like us were using the plants, the large organic growers mostly were not. At the end of the last season they were in operation, a large percentage of Prather’s plants went unsold.

So it was into that context that Lisa Bunin at The Center for Food Safety gathered together an impressive list of people in the industry to try to move forward on this issue. Over the last three years this group has met every six months or so and one of the possible solutions to come out of these meetings was the production of organic greenhouse “plugs” that are grown in flats as opposed to the bare-root, outdoor grown plants that are the current industry standard. Greenheart Nursery in Arroyo Grande took her up on this challenge and this season produced a limited number of organically grown starts.

We signed on to trial 2000 of these plants and a couple of weeks ago they arrived—big and healthy. We let them harden off in our shade house for a week or so, and then planted them out right before the big storm last week. Over the coming weeks and months we will be comparing the transplants to our other plants in terms of vigor, disease resistance, seasonality and yield.

(Left: dry root strawberry start, Right: organic strawberry plug start)

Whether these plants will be a viable option for organic growers remains to be seen. Right now, price is a major obstacle—these plants sold for $1.00 each as opposed to $.14 for the dry-root conventional plants. Greenheart, however, says that if demand and efficiency increase, the price will fall considerably. The logistics of storage and delivery will have to be worked out too. The plants take up a lot of space—two of the boxed 72 count flats take up as much space as 1000 boxed dry-root plants.

The other part of the equation is that the organic certifiers need to figure out a way to help increase the demand by requiring some level of purchasing of organic starts that increases as the supply increases. We’re hopeful that these developments will eventually lead to greater availability and use of organic starter stock.