When I look at university extension information for growing strawberries they say to replace the day- neutral plants every year and replace the June bearing every 3 to 5 years. If i don’t want to buy plants, can I create beds of mother plants and use the runners from those?
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Yes I do but it’s not that easy. Usually I throw away hundreds of plants. It’s hard to tell age of plants. Tough to throw away big healthy plants. Beds easily become way overcrowded and unproductive when in that condition.
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Yes, the runners will create new plants. I put little pots at the nodes where the new plants appear and hold them down in the potting soil with little clips so that they create roots. After the new plant has roits and is well established, you can cut the runner and put the plant wherever you want it. Or you can let it grow directly in the dirt and then dig it up and move it
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I started a bed of early glow last spring… 25 plants… and kept the blooms and runers pulled off until the mother plants had established very well… big and healthy.
Then late summer early fall… i let one runner go and start a new small plant. Allowed only one runner to start another per mother plant.
After allowing the mother plant one runner to set… i kept all other runners pulled off.
Once good and dormant… i can dig those new plants from the runner and transplant them to another bed…
That works for me… can basically double my strawberry plants yearly… without over stressing the mother plants so they produce well longer.
Good luck
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Agree with the above tips but I will also add I’ve kept day neutral strawberries producing for 3 years and I have not noticed a significant difference in production.
Letting them get too overcrowded with each other however will hurt quality/size/production
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Yes, you certainly can take plants from an existing planting and create a fresh planting.
The main reason to hesitate might be disease…but if the foliage on your current berries is healthy and diseases have not been an issue on your existing berry plants, no reason you have to buy fresh plants all the time.
Things like anthracnose, leaf spots, red steele, wilts…can cause strawberry bed losses after a year or three and fresh plants might give a good couple years before succumbing to such diseases (and old plants might not).
But, many of the June-bearing varieties today are partly or completely resistant to some of the diseases that bothered old varieties of the 1940’s or 1960’s. Earliglow comes to mind as one that is quite immune to most diseases.
Further, using ‘free’ existing plants, you can plant them closer/thicker and not have to
be patient for runner plants to fill in so much.
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Cool- I was planning on just doing a rotation between my planting beds and include the strawberries in that. But after reading up on strawberries I started overthinking it. My berries this year were plentiful but not as good as previous years, and I only had June bearing. Seeing as I like to leave the garden with a full stomach I needed to up the game. Ill just put the strawberries on a 2-year rotation and move the young runners after summer vegetables are pulled.
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you can cut x holes in plastic row cover or use thick mulch. what i do is plant the original plants 1 ft. apart. when they send out runners i cut a second hole halfway in between them and allow 1 runner to root. the next year i pull the original plant and again rooting another runner, adding some compost into the hole before doing so. after 5 years i pull the plastic in the fall , till in a bunch of compost and amendments, lay down the plastic again and plant fresh stock. no weeds and no overcrowding. i also put down a layer of woodchips on the plastic to keep the berries off of it and to keep the plastic from heating the soil too much. a upick berry farm near me does it this way. you can cut all the other runners off to start another bed or let them go off of the bed to root and just till them under in the fall.
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Grass and weeds are voracious competitors…if you can keep them from taking over, you can get 3 or 4 years from a berry bed if you’ll cultivate it lightly once a summer and rake or bring a bit of additional soil to help anchor the fresh runners each year after you clip the leaves of the plant bed. Thick compacted old beds don’t let the current crop of runners set and anchor if the soil isn’t disturbed in some manner. That, and add a little fertilizer sometime in mid and/or late summer. Late summer the buds for next season’s blooms form.
Good luck.
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Those ideas can certainly work. But take more effort in my view.
Having several options lets the other person make their choices.
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That is a really good idea.
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ive tried it just about every other way. this is the simplest ive found. once their roots are all matted together its alot of work to try and thin them out. this way you control how many plants can root. Tnhunter does similar with mulch instead. you definitely dont need to replace the plants as often as i do. sometimes i leave each plant in for 2 years instead. depends on the disease load. this way i also dont need to spray either. many of the fungal issues you have is from soil splashing on the leaves when it rains hard. its a non issue doing it this way.
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I like the multch on plastic, keeps the sun from destroying it. I see You’re in a similar zone as me, what varieties do you grow? Ive got Cavendish and Honeoye (both June bearers), adding Seascape (day neutral) to try to have berries through summer. I made raise beds 10x10ft for each, but am switching to 10x2ft. The berries in the middle didnt get as big and were too hard to pick.
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In my urban garden in the Pacific Northwest, I have a severe problem with strawberry diseases. Strawberries are my favorite fruit, but my plants are lucky to get through the first year of growth before succumbing to some kind of disease. I try to grow day-neutral varieties for two years in a 7 year rotation garden; so, I can’t keep plants for more than two years. I’m lucky if a plant makes it to the second year. I’ve tried different varieties to check their disease resistance and found that Seascape and Albion are the most resistant. They often make it to the second year, but with reduced production.
These plants produce plenty of runners, but I remove almost all of them because I won’t use them in a new bed for fear of introducing disease. So, I have to buy new bare-root plants every year. I thought of starting runners in pots with fresh potting soil, but I’ve read that some common diseases can be transmitted through the stolons connecting to the runners.
I’m thinking that covering the strawberry bed with a poly row cover might reduce the disease problem, but I don’t know how pollination will be affected. Keeping the ends of the row covers open should let bees in, but will they enter in sufficient numbers for good pollination? Has anyone here tried a row cover on strawberries?
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I can normally leave strawberries uncovered over winter and they do just fine.
Our unusually cold night of 3F last winter just b4 Christmas… wiped out about 80% of my crop.
I have considered covering my two main beds with straw… or row cover this winter… but have not done that yet.
Anyone know of a really good row cover product for that ?
It can be hard to find straw in the fall here.
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i have archer and galetta right now. i prefer junebearing so the crop comes in all at once. i have lots of alpine day neutrals from the strawberry store that give me berries all summer to forage. i grow the non runnering types. very tasty in yogurts and such.
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your climate is very challenging for berries. row covers might help but the heats a issue as well. maybe research heat tolerant varieties?
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I am surprised you have such loses through winter. I am now in 6a (used to be 5b) and I haven’t covered my strawbs through a winter yet and I haven’t lost a plant. Some of the outer leaves die back a bit but for whatever reason they have been surviving the winters
Growing Seascape, Albion and Earlyglo
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This past spring I redid my beds to plastic in the same way, through the first season I like the results. I used to battle fungal issues if I left berries on the plant long enough and this year it was significantly reduced. I hope it stays that way
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I haven’t covered anything for winter and never had issues, although in a typical year the snow would already be a foot deep by now, so this may be the year to challenge that for me. I’ve not seen a lot of disease pressure. I haven’t noticed any cold snaps below -25F in a couple years, but those come in January-February when there is a lot of snow on the ground. We got the bump from 3 to 4a last time they did the re-zoning.
Honey bees are pretty good at figuring out how to get into stuff, and they tell all their buddies back at the hive, not sure if other bees have that communication.
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