Does the Climbing Strawberry Plant Really Work?

The Climbing Strawberry Plant sounds like a great deal at first: who wouldn’t want an extra-tall strawberry plant that’s bursting with ripe, organic, mouth-watering strawberries packed with antioxidants and other vitamins and minerals? But is this what you really get?

Overview
If you love strawberries you probably hate the experience of buying them. They have to be in season for you to have a chance, and a lot of the times the packs you find in the grocery store have traveled a long way and are loaded with preservatives to try to keep their freshness. Also there’s no way to determine when they were picked, and how long they’ve been in cold storage. You can try hitting up a farmer’s market, and you’ll typically have better luck buying locally, but unless you live in a place that has a regular farmer’s market you might be out of luck.

The Claim
The big claim by the folks behind the Climbing Strawberry Plant is that it will yield plenty of delicious strawberries that you can pick at your leisure and add to recipes or just eat straight for a healthy snack. The health benefits of strawberries are well-documented, and if you can get them without all of the chemicals and genetically modified ingredients that come in ordinary strawberries you see at the store, so much the better.

The Hype
The hype here is provided by how much grocery stores and supermarkets charge for decent looking organic fruits and vegetables. There’s definitely a surcharge in place for these items compared to their conventionally grown counterparts.

The Cost
You end up getting a total of 6 Climbing Strawberry plants for $24. It breaks down so that you’re paying $10 for the actual plants, but $14 for the shipping. This renders their 30 day money back guarantee moot, since you’d only be getting back your $10 and still be out $14. This also means that the company is risking nothing, because

it won’t cost $14 to ship the plants, so they’re keeping whatever the difference is and defraying whatever the cost is to produce the plants, likely already making a profit just from the shipping charges.

The Commitment
This is billed as being an easy way to grow strawberries, and you should be able to set it up and forget about it once you receive them.

Evaluation
We’re leery of any offer of a plant like this that promises it will grow and provide plenty of fruit. There are too many things that can go wrong in the development of a plant, and it’s hard to be sure of what you’re going to get, even if you follow all of the steps carefully and provide all of the right conditions. They don’t provide enough conclusive evidence that you’ll get enough strawberries to justify the price tag on this one.

We’d also like to see them have a little more faith in their product, and price it in a way that shares the risk and puts more responsibility on the company to provide a product that lives up to its claims. They end up with nothing to lose, and you end up rolling the dice on whether or not you’re flushing your money down the drain. Not cool.

Final Climbing Strawberry Plant Review

When you consider that you’d be paying $6 or more for a packet of organic strawberries in your local grocery store, you’d only need this to successful grow 4 packets worth of strawberries to break even. Since you’re getting six plants there’s a chance you might be able to get a deal. The Climbing Strawberry Plant would be good if it can grow back every year and produce strawberries every season, but there’s no evidence to be found that it actually does this, so we’re giving it our Risky Try rating.

Why is it risky? Because as the consumer you have no leverage here, and are absorbing all of the risk.

There’s no guarantees when it comes to nature, and the one that the company provides is next to useless. Also, there’s little chance that you’ll be able to tell without a doubt if this is working or not within 30 days. Even if you decide to take them up on their offer, they’ll potentially credit you back the $10 and keep $14 for their troubles. In the end they’ll win no matter what they send you, which does not give much of an incentive to provide a quality product.

Our Recommendation
Instead of going with a pig in a poke offer like this one, talk to your local gardening experts and ask how you can grow your own organic strawberries from home. You might also want to look into getting into hydroponics so that you can grow your own fruits and vegetables year round, and using your own quality control standards.

What do you think? Does the Climbing Strawberry Plant work or not?