Thursday 13 November 2014

Tidying-up the Strawberries

My Strawberry plants were being slowly but inexorably submerged in fallen Maple leaves. I judged it the right moment to give them their annual tidy-up.


The shingle round the Strawberry containers was criss-crossed with runners, many of them firmly rooted in the soil below. It almost seemed a shame to rip them up.


The Strawberry is a very vigorous self-propagator, and each plant will produce loads of runners, making a new plant every foot or so.


Each of these is a ready-made clone of its parent. Getting new Strawberry plants is a simple as snipping off the runner, trimming it...


...and potting it up (seen here in a 3" pot).


The tidy-up didn't take long: a few snips with the secateurs and this is what was left:


Now I know it is good practice to renew Strawberry plants every few year, because they do gradually lose their vigour, so I decided that it would be appropriate to establish a routine for this. I removed and discarded the oldest plants and replaced them with four of the best runners, adding a bit of new compost to get them off to a good start. I was able to identify the oldest plants because they still had the original plant-labels in the soil next to them. [Top left in photo above.] Now for the really organised part: I gave each of the four containers a reference number, indicated by a different-coloured and numbered label...


And each container will now be replaced in rotation, every fourth year!

Here we see the containers sporting the new labels:


Simples!

4 comments:

  1. My strawberry runners have taken over the strawberry bed. I'm a bit afraid they might be too crowded now, but I figured I just wouldn't worry about it right now. I'll see how they do next year.

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  2. Very well organised - we need to choose varieties for our new bed soon, We want a completely fresh start so no clones this year.

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  3. I'm glad you posted this. Strawberry cultivation is comparatively new in our area. This is exactly what I'll be doing in the coming years...

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  4. I am so jealous of your strawberry, Mark. Mine was died months ago.

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