Just planted a couple months ago, after reading so many positive comments on this variety here. Plants are growing well and have put on a lot of flowers (unlike June bearing plants I’ve raised in the past, which only make a few the year of planting, which I’ve generally taken off).
I think I should probably take off those flowers, but I figured I would ask. I’ve not grown everbearing types before. Alpines I let bear the first year and they were fine, but I think this is considered unhelpful for normal strawberries.
Commercial growers remove the first flowers to set and then go back several times and remove all of the runners. But, they treat day neutral strawberries as annuals and plant them sequentially. If you are going for a matted row it is probably better to remove most of the flowers this year, but I don’t think it is really necessary if the plants are growing well. Pick the flowers or pick the berries…
Seascape is so productive some plants died last year cause they put out nothing but flowers. After that I got some advice from a local farmer. MdB actually performed fairly well the first year also, a little less productive than SS but more steady. Elan made berries the first year from seed for me also, all of the plants are still doing OK this year, birds are finally busy with mulberries so I am even getting to freeze a bunch.
They say you should pull off flowers for everbearing and day neutral till around July 1st on newly planted plants. Growing them a bit now, I never saw a difference. Except maybe first year berries were OK, not great. The plants seem to do well if I did or didn’t, so I no longer even worry about it. I usually pull off any on it when planting and that’s it.
I’m with Drew, they say to pull them off for the first month so I started removing the flowers, but it got way ahead of me by the second week so I stopped. There is no difference between the plants I did and the ones I didn’t.