This is the only time of the year I care for strawberries. I’ve never tried to grow them myself, but they’re on my list of things to try next year. If you have strawberry growing advice, please share it with me.
Granny’s strawberry cobbler recipe is similar to her peach cobbler.
Strawberry Cobbler
- 1 stick of butter
- 1 cup of self-rising flour
- 1 cup milk
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 4 cups sliced strawberries (if strawberries are not very sweet-toss with additional sugar)
Place butter in a 9 x 13 pan and put in oven. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Mix together flour, sugar, milk, and vanilla until smooth.
Once butter is melted pour flour mixture into pan. Do not stir.
Spoon strawberries on top of flour mixture. Do not stir.
Bake until crust has turned a golden brown. About 45 minutes.
Tipper
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Tipper! I made this last night, with one addition. My other half loves oats, so I added a cup to the recipe. It added a nice nutty flavor to a great blueberry cobbler! Thanks, as always, for the great idea.
It was snowing and cold here, so we thought a nice bubbly cobbler would warm us up. It did, and the cold ice cream on top was also a welcome bonus! Hehe
Growing strawberries:
Mulch is your friend. I lay down lots of wood chips or old hay, and then dig down to the soil, and lay the strawberry roots on the soil, and cover with mulch. The roots will find their way.
Keep as weeded as you can.
Plant a few the first year, and then let the runners root. In the fall, dig out all the plants, and replant using whatever spacing you like. You will have an abundance of berries. Keep planting them in the mulch year after year, and keep replacing the mulch in the fall, so it has the winter to break down and feed your plants.
They do well in raised beds but weeds really will make them grow slower, and give you fewer berries.
You can “tuck them in” wherever you have an empty spot, and they will spread there.
I like to place them out and about in sunny spots where I walk. So I’m surprised when there are yummy things to eat in the spring.
My aunt Nanny would get a quart or two of fresh strawberries in season, late May through June here in Maryland. She would top them and leave whole, or halve or quarter them depending on size and sprinkle a gracious plenty of sugar on them in a bowl. After several hours, they would exude their juice and mix with the sugar. She would make drop shortcakes, like biscuits except shorter and lightly sweetened. She cut them across in two, put the bottom half in a bowl, spooned over the strawberries and juice, add the top half and more berries and top the whole with sweetened, whipped cream. A once a year heavenly treat, real Strawberry Shortcake!
I halved the recipe and used fresh sour cherries because I had a few on hand. It was delicious!
I love strawberries any way you fix them . Grandpa Nix had a strawberry patch when i was a little girl and I could feast on all the strawberries I could eat back then. Good memories of precious past times!
Speaking of lightening bugs, have the katydids started up there yet?
Leslie-I haven’t heard them yet 🙂
I have made that very strawberry cobbler, yum yum! I have also tried strawberry pudding (similar to banana pudding, but with strawberries).
I decided to try growing strawberries for the first time this year. I planted mine in a strawberry jug. It is a 2 & 1/2 ft. tall, terracotta pocket jug. I placed it next to my steps so I could keep an eye on it. The strawberries started off strong. I pinched off the first blooms, and the blooms more than doubled in number. We had a couple mouths full, then the birds found them. The plants are fairing well but have not started blooming again. They were the everbearing variety. Good luck, and have fun.
We use to have a small bed of strawberries, but after 2 yrs, the weeds took over. It was so hard to keep them out. It is nice to just go out and pick your own. The lady itske care of, a few ago she made a strawberry cobbler, i tried it, it was ok but i still love the peach best. I do like strawberries just to eat.
And by the way I consider it a Sin to cook a strawberry! If they are bought, wash them thoroughly and eat them as is or dip them in a little sugar if they are too sour. Or a little chocolate sauce if you are a chocoholic. If you are picking them from your on garden all you need to do is check for spiders before you put them in your mouth. Spiders don’t taste good! Even on a strawberry!
I can tell you how we used to grow strawberries up on Wiggins Creek. We set out plants in the spring for the following year. Like in 2020 to pick in 2021. We always pinched the blooms from the mother plants the first year to encourage runners. We kept the walkway between rows clean and trained the new plants to take root there. That way we always had new plants coming on. The next year after picking season was over we plowed up the original row and started training new runners back into it. You can plow in compost or your choice of nitrogen rich fertilizer if your soil needs it as you plow out the old plants. You just switch the rows back and forth and you’ll always have new more vigorous plants. If you do try this method you’ll need to mark your rows well because you will lose them in the mass of greenery you will have.
The main thing is to not be tempted to grow strawberries the first year you plant. Pinch those buds and blooms.
Don’t be discouraged by what you read and hear. I’ll bring you some plants to try. Had them for years but don’t know the variety. Have moved them several times, they have been abused, not taken care of as the experts say and still we have plants, although more when they are weeded. Picked lots of berries last year but then let weeds take over so not so many to pick this year. Knowing how your family works your garden I’d expect these to do well. We didn’t have much luck with ever bearing, these are runners with plenty to share. We’ve shared lots of plants and delicious berries. We couldn’t resist picking the first year and didn’t dig them up and replace a few years later as suggested. We just watched when the grandparent plants looked spent and replaced with babies. Had plenty to eat, freeze and share. Are worth a try.
I tried them once a long time ago. They were great one year, but once they started spreading out they became small and sparse. It seemed too much effort to only have one year of success, so I never tried it again. I am sure there is a way to mange them so they grow well, but they did not have YouTube back then so I was without advice. When I was small the farm was loaded with wild strawberries, and our favorite snack was strawberries with milk and sugar. It seemed like back then nature had great treats all over the place and at different times such as apples, strawberries, and blackberries. I fixed a blackberry cobbler once using that same cobbler recipe, and it was so good my sweet little niece was scraping the pan. That looks so good, I just must try with strawberries.
The only advice I can share is to put a bunny proof fence around your plants. I tried growing my strawberries in a large tiered homemade raised bed. The chicken wire fence I used still allowed critters to crawl through or over top of it to feast on the plants. I discovered the nylon deer fence this year and put it around my entire garden. It’s about $20 for a 7′ x 100′ roll and worth every penny. It’s so tightly woven, bugs are the only thing that can get in.
No doubt the cobbler is delicious, but I have never had so many strawberries that I was
willing to cook them! They are perfect all by themselves, although I usually make
strawberry shortcake once each season. J have never had much luck growing them.
The small, very sweet Louisiana berries are the best I have ever tasted, but I can’t
get them in New Mexico. We get California berries in the stores.
Love your recipe. I learned this one a long time ago; Instead of the flour mixture, use a box of yellow cake mix. Put filling down first, dry cake mix next, then drizzle butter over top. Bake 350 oven till golden brown. Quick to make, quick to disappear!
I have 5 or 6 strawberry plants I planted, too few really. I thought they would runner and I would get more plants but it seems these don’t. The variety is an “everbearing” and the name is “berries galore pink”. So my first advice would be to understand the nature of the particular cultivar you plant. Mine are pretty little plants; deep green with evergreen leaves and red and pink bloom. I would grow them just for pretty as foundation plantings if it weren’t for having too much shade here at the house. They bloom nearly year round and are reputed to produce three crops/year; spring, summer, fall; that is “everbearing”. However, I don’t get but 5 or 6 berries at a time because critters of various kinds get them first, apparently before they even get ripe. I don’t know what kind of critters. It could be chipmunks, voles, birds, snails, etc. I buried 1/4″ mesh hardware cloth around the bed about 8″ deep but it has not seemed to make any difference.
We planted a lot of Ozark Beauty strawberries when I was a kid, over fifty years ago. At that time the advice was to not allow the plants to either runner or bear the first year. The idea was to put all the growth into the establishment of the plantings. Pinching out blooms and runners was a lot of work. It had to be done every day or two. And it was a lot of bending. I think all that has pretty much changed since then but I am not sure. Ozark Beauty is a runner so it establishes new plants and rejuvenates itself. But older plants need to be taken out on a rotation and it gets hard to know the ages of various plants if they are allowed to run willy-nilly. All of that can be overcome in a small bed but in your case (as in mine) finding the balance of bed size, growing conditions and desired quantity could be a challenge. In our case as a kid we tried to grow far too many, thinking we could sell excess, and our zeal for strawberries went into decline.
I did find out that in commercial production fields are typically completely replaced on a 1-2 year rotation, just plowed under and replanted. I doubt you are thinking that way in a home garden.
Tipper,
The Lightning Bugs are out. Matter of fact, they’ve been out for over a week now. When Me and Harold was little, we’d get one of Mama’s quart jars and put Lightning bugs in them. That saved on the Power Bills to cause Daddy made us go to bed early, unless Wayne Rainy and his family came on our old Radio. I liked the way the Family done, “over the Rollin’ seas.”
Anyway, Harold and I caught Lightning bugs, and lay in bed watching them until we fell asleep. We’d thurn them loose as soon as we got up, so we could catch them again the next night. It was amazing to watch and we’d take a knife and punch holes in the lid, so they could have air. They was fun to watch, and a few would keep their lights on throughout the ordeal. …Ken
I saw a lightening bug tonight too. And I heard the first whippoorwill of the season.
Strawberry anything of food sounds tasty to me and your cobbler looks delicious and colorful. Rhubarb in strawberries does well combined in my opinion. All I know is strawberries are heavily PESTICIDE laden ( if not the top culprit) and after reading a BP&A comment, it seems to me EVERYBODY loves these tasty berries! Good luck growing them. And good luck to we the consumers of strawberries that we can find local and less “treated” strawberries. Have a blessed week all of you out there!
Tipper–I enjoy strawberries a great deal, and wild strawberries will make me nod my head in agreement with a statement in Izaak Walton’s book, “The Compleat Angler:” “Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless he never did.”
That being said, I’d suggest you have second thoughts about growing them. They are terribly labor intensive, have lots of “enemies” from bugs and snails (eat the berries) to rabbits, have to be regularly replanted, and if you’ve got a “pick your own’ place nearby that’s just easier. I’ve tried fooling with them enough to know I don’t want to do it any more.
Jim Casada
I love fresh strawberries but I’ve never cared for them cooked or even made into jam. The fresh ones I can eat all day! Strawberries and rhubarb are good good together!
Well, I could help eat the cobbler but help growing strawberries not so much I order mine this year and between the rabbits eating the tops or the pill bugs, I’m down to 3 plants and 2 are in containers just to keep them from becoming someone’s desert.