Summer sweetness: the do’s and don’t’s of strawberry planting
They fall into that category of home-growns that are so bursting with flavour straight from the plant that any shop-bought counterpart can only pale in comparison. Growing your own strawberries ensures that they are picked at their optimum and allows these high value fruits to be eaten straight from the plant, which can only enhance flavour and goodness.
Growing your own also gives you the liberty of choosing varieties that may not don shop shelves and the scope to stretch out the strawberry season by planting early, midseason, late and perpetual-fruiting strawberries.
When growing strawberries, general care is important. Always harvest fruit when it is fully red and be warned there will be plenty of others lined up for a munch if you are not vigilant. Clearly all ripening strawberries should be protected with netting to prevent the many winged harvesters but slugs will ravage crops also if left unchecked. It pays to use your most effective mode of slug control be that organic slug pellets or simply hand-picking. Straw is the most common mulch used for strawberries but make sure to remove this after cropping as it may just become the perfect hotel for pests to over winter.
To increase strawberry stocks it is important to understand their mode of reproduction, which simply comes about after fruiting when the plants throw out long stems (stolons) at the end of which young plantlets (runners) form.
Strawberries can be grown from seed but these runners will provide new strawberry plants much quicker.
As the new plants are clones of the parent, they can be selected for beneficial characteristics such as prolific fruiting or adapting to local conditions. Never take runners from a diseased looking plant. The simplest way of getting strong new plants is to select runners from a good healthy, vigorously growing parent plant. Choose the runners closest to the mother plant and those that have put on a lot of leaf and root growth. Extend out the remaining runners and pinch them off. One strawberry plant may send out several runners and it is important to remove them to prevent your strawberry bed from becoming overcrowded and losing its productive vigor. Runners tend to plant themselves just about anywhere and if left unchecked they will grow like a weed. Removing them, not only benefits your plant stocks, but also your strawberry plot.
Runners will root while still attached to the parent plant so strawberries are referred to as a self-layering plant. Runners have to be removed regularly to ensure that the mother plant is strong and gives all its energy to producing fruit itself as opposed to supporting offspring. In order to move each new plant to a new home, it is best to root them into individual pots first – 7.5 cm (3 inch) pots are ideal. Fill pots with potting compost (ideally a compost/sand mix) and dig a hole, not too close to the parent plant but within the length of the selected runner. Bury the pot up to its rim and place the runner on top of the compost in the pot, and hold the stem in place with a stone, or pin it down with a U-shaped fencing pin or length of wire. Keep new plants well watered and after a month or so, the plant will have rooted and can be cut from the parent plant. The new plants can then be moved into a prepared bed in the autumn and if dealing with lots of potted up plantlets, it may be a good idea to put them in trenches in a raised bed as a temporary stop until a permanent one is prepared for them.
