How did you receive them? As bare rooted starts? If so, the roots need to be protected from drying out. You can pot them in containers temporarily or just heel them into damp sawdust or a similar medium until you are ready to plant them out in the ground.

Yes, they are bare root and I have kept them in a dark, cool place with damp paper towels over the mulch and check on them ever few days. But they need to be in dirt and in the garden :0( I will plant them in temp containers today and hope for the best. It will probably be another two weeks (unless we get more wet stuff) before we can set them out. Timing on the rain just wasn't good this year. Thanks much.

Get them into a light, cool place. The leaves will go yellow and die without light. I'm wondering whether you even need to hold them over at all. Just exactly how wet is the soil outside? Sloppy mud or just a bit moist? If the latter you could plant them now if the temperature is OK.

I agree with Floral, Are you growing them as annuals? If not then it sounds like it is not a good spot as they are going to be so wet that they will die, sounds like a terrible spot! What about next year? They will do fine in pots too. Get them into the light, indirect at first if possible. Cloudy rainy weather is perfect plant out time here. The plants get a chance to overcome transplant shock without burning in the sun.

MUD - GLORIOUS MUD! No way can we plant directly into garden ;0(

We always have a wet Spring - but this is exceptionally wet. We have grown berries here for several years and they do great. We just wanted to try the Heirloom Dunlap berries my dad used to grow 50 years ago and our timing was off.

When it rains 3-5 inches every few days - well, garden soil does require sun and wind for a few days straight to dry out - and we just haven't had that. We never had this problem with our last two berry patches. The plants and the weather cooperated :0)

Maybe down the road you can build some raised beds. Say these don't make it in the ground, an option anyway. Yeah mud sucks, it can be like that around here. I grow my strawberries in raised beds Here they are keeping a blueberry plant company.

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Here is a bigger bed of them

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Our garden raises dandy berries.More than we can eat, freeze and give away :0)

But catching the dirt at just the right time for planting berries - now that is the trick. It's the first time we have ever been 'caught' like this. Hubs checked this morning and thinks 'if we don't get any more rain this week (yes, they are predicting more) we can plant them. I checked the new plants and they don't look as bad now that I have given them some sunlight - looking greener. So, we may save them in yet. Thanks everyone for your comments. Appreciate them.

I use the raised beds as it was easy to train my dog to stay out of them. Also to control PH for blueberries. We are still eating last year's harvest ourselves. I've taken a liking to pineberries.
Taste a lot different than traditional strawberries.

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You are correct to wait to plant until the soil dries out some. It's not that the moisture would hurt the plants all that much - they'll grow in mud or very wet soil on a temporary basis - it is far more likely that you will damage your soil if you try to work it when it's too wet. It changes the soil structure and results in compaction.......not a good thing!

yes - therefore we wait......................

We share garden space with our neighbor - one Spring he 'did us a favor' and tilled our side of the garden too - while it was still quite WET. No garden that year :0(

In case anyone doesn't know - tilling or working wet soil turns it into tiny(and sometimes large) rocks that don't go away until they experience a winter of freezing and thawing. Our neighbor was fairly new to gardening. He meant well. :-\