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Home » Blog » Growing Hydroponic Strawberries

Growing Hydroponic Strawberries

Posted May 20, 2023
in Gardening

By Kevin Pritchett

If you are like us, you may be running out of space in your raised garden beds or looking for more sustainable gardening practices or even a new growing media. If so, try using a hydroponic system to grow your strawberries.

You can plant your garden indoors for a year-round growing season. Grow hydroponic strawberries in water full of nutrients for the best tasting, most beautiful strawberries on the farm!

Why You Should Grow Hydroponic Strawberries

We enjoy getting back to the basics of learning traditional skills like farming and gardening. We also want to learn self-sustainable skills to help us survive a crisis and prepare our kids for the future.

This is one reason why we raise our kids on the farm. They learn alongside us as we raise chickens, extract honey from the hives, raise turkeys, butcher quail, farrow pigs, or bottle feeding our goats.

They also learn how to grow their own food using a combination of traditional skills and technologies like orchard care, soil testing, automatic drip irrigation systems, and vermicomposting.

Learning several different growing methods helps diversify our options to fit our needs, which led us to look into setting up a hydroponics system to plant lettuce and strawberries. Hydroponics offers a great, soil-free, year-round option for growing food.

As we experiment with growing hydroponic strawberries, we look forward to expanding and honing in our self-sustainability for our family now and into the future.

What Are Hydroponic Strawberries

Hydroponic strawberries grow in water rather than in soil. These strawberries gain all the necessary nutrients from liquid fertilizers added to the water. The many benefits of growing strawberry plants using hydroponics include the following:

Soil Free – You do not need soil when using hydroponics, eliminating the need for making compost and all the necessary soil requirements for growing strawberries. You only need water and a natural liquid plant food.
Fewer Pests – Strawberries grown through hydroponics experience fewer pests and diseases since they grow in controlled environments where you can monitor the temperature and access to light. Growing in water instead of soil also eliminates root rot or other diseases related to growing on the ground in soil.
Pesticide Free – Growing strawberries in the ground often calls for spraying the soil with pesticides to protect your strawberry crop from pests and diseases. With fewer pests, no need to use pesticides.
Extended Growing Season – You can grow hydroponics strawberries year round! When you use the hydroponic method, you grow indoors with a grow light. That means you can control the temperature and the amount of light the strawberries receive.
Saves Space – You use way less space with hydroponics. This would be a great method to try if you have limited garden space.
Saves Water – You actually use less water with hydroponics. It takes more water to keep the soil moist when you water a garden because not all of the water goes directly to the plant. With hydroponics, the water doubles as a growing medium, so the plants receive all the water you use. There is no water waste.

Do Hydroponic Strawberries Taste Different

Some people say hydroponic strawberries taste better than strawberries grown in soil others say they taste slightly more tart. But, what is noticeably different is the larger size and health of the strawberries.

Taste can differ depending on the soil type and growing conditions of any plant. This is the same with hydroponics. Just like growing in soil, fruit taste best with proper nutrition, good water quality, and proper sunlight.

Make sure your plants have the proper access to light, fresh water, and plant food.

Plant Food – Be sure to add liquid fertilizer to your hydroponics system that is formulated for strawberries. Look for a nutrient solution full of essential nutrients, like calcium and magnesium. Calcium is essential for pollen development and for fighting off mold. Magnesium plays a role in the production of chlorophyll. Your hydroponic nutrients should also include nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. Nitrogen is important during the early stages of growth, and potassium during the flowering stages. Read the label on your plant food bottle and ensure it contains various macronutrients and micronutrients.
Light – Increase or adjust the light source. Make sure all the berries and leaves receive a good amount of light.
pH Level – You can also adjust the pH by adding a liquid amendment. For sweeter strawberry production, an alkaline solution is best between 6.0 and 7.0.

A man adding pellets to a strawberry plant in a hydroponic system.

Pollinating Hydroponic Strawberries

When you plant strawberries outside in your garden, the wind and pollinators like bees or butterflies pollinate the flowers on the strawberry plant, which produce fruit.

This cross-pollination gives the plant a high strawberry yield, and the strawberries grow bigger, redder, and less deformed. Pollination plays a huge role in the look and taste of your strawberries.

So, if you grow your strawberries indoors, sheltered from the wind and insects, you need to help pollinate them. Here are some ways to pollinate your strawberries:

Hand Pollinate – Use a soft brush like a small paint brush to brush the flowers of the strawberry plants. Gently run the brush from the outside of the flower to the middle to move the pollen from the stamens to the pistils. Do this on all the flowers two to three times a week.
Electric Pollinator – An electric pollinator is a tool that vibrates the flowers on the strawberry plant, loosening the pollen to travel to the pistils of the flowers.
Allow Insects In – Leave a door or window open during the day, so that insects can find their way in to pollinate your strawberries.
Fan or Leaf Blower – You can use a fan or leaf blower to emulate wind, but this is risky. You do not want to damage the structure of the plants with high-powered air. If you use this method, keep the fan or blower on a low, gentle setting.

Pro-Tip: Many varieties of strawberries do well grown using hydroponics, but some varieties are self-pollinating, like the Quinault variety.

Supplies Needed

Liquid Plant Food – Use liquid fertilizer to provide food for your plants.
PVC Pipe Hydroponics Garden Kit – We purchased our hydroponics kit from Amazon. Look for a system that meets your size requirements and contains all the needed equipment.
Light – Hang grow lights over your strawberry plants. A LED 400K temperature light should work just as well.
Clay Pebbles – Clay pebbles weigh down the plastic baskets that hold the plant’s root system.
Plastic Tub with Lid – Use a dark-colored plastic tub to deter algae from growing. We used a tub that can hold over 20 gallons of water.
Access to Electricity or Solar Battery Cells – You will need to plug in the water pump to a power source.
Timer – You can hook up the pump and grow lights to timers to keep your system more hands-off.
Strawberry Plants – Many varieties of strawberries whether June bearing, everbearing, or day neutral do well in hydroponics. Just make sure you gently clean all the roots of the strawberry plants with water to remove any soil before placing them in the plastic baskets included in the hydroponics kit.
Bucket – Use a bucket or a hose to fill the tub with clean water.

How to Grow Hydroponic Strawberries

Set up your hydroponics kit in a dry location. We set our kit up in our shop near an electric outlet. We use a PVC pipe hydroponics system. A water pump moves the water through the pipes, cycling fresh water to the root systems in the plant. The hydroponics kit includes the following: The frame, a pump, planting baskets, planting sponges, and a timer. It was easy to put the frame together.
Set up a large dark, colored plastic tub underneath the frame and set up the pump.
Fill the tub with water. We transported the water in buckets to the tub.
Add the recommended amount of liquid plant food to the tub of water. Follow the instruction on the label to get the correct ratio.
Cover the tub with a lid. Make sure the light does not reach the tub. You do not want to allow algae to grow.
Prepare your strawberry plants. If you are transplanting plants that were in the soil, clean the roots by gently scrubbing them under running water to wash away all the soil.
Place each plant’s roots through the planting baskets that came with the PVC pipe hydroponics kit. Carefully thread them through the bottom hole without breaking the main roots.
Add three or four clay pebbles to the basket around the top of the plant. This just helps weigh the basket down so the water flow does not tilt the basket.
Place your baskets in the holes in the hydroponics frame.
Add your grow lights above the plants. LED 400K temperature lights work just fine. Depending on the size of your hydroponics frame, you may want more than one grow light. All the strawberries need light. Play around with the placement and the angles of the lights for optimum exposure.
Turn on your pump. You can put your lights and water pump on timers so that your plants have light and dark intervals and water movement. Alternatively, some people choose to keep the water pump on all the time.
You are now a hydroponics farmer! Check on your strawberries periodically, and once you have flowers on the plants, make sure they get pollinated.

If you want this to be an off-the-grid project, set up the water pump with solar battery packs. Hydroponics systems work well with solar power too.

We hope you enjoy your hydroponics journey! If you want to learn more about our family farm, subscribe to our Hidden Heights Farm newsletter. We would love to share the journey with you!