Gardening

Looks delicious! Good job, llama🦙! Last year I got good at strawberries and I’m so eager to share what worked for me. I grow Rainier which are June bearers. If your berries ripen pretty much all at once they are June bearers, if they ripen continuously all summer you have ever bearers. Either way here are some basic tips. When they finish flowering cut back the entire plant to about 5 cm. Looks and feels awful but works great. Then add an all purpose fertilizer. This is the only time of the year you fertilize- after harvest. Thin the plants until you get 40 cm between each plant. As the plant grows back, remove the runners. It sounds like you’re getting runners now. Remove them. You want your plant focusing on berries. I mulch the beds with straw over the winter and remove it in spring.

Each strawberry plant has a lifespan of about 5 years. Year one you should pluck all the flowers off, forcing the plant to grow bigger first. Years 3-4 will be the biggest harvest. Year 4 or 5 you will collect the runners off the plant for your next bed. Let them grow some roots before removing them from the mother in the early fall. Plant them in a new bed so you’re doing crop rotation. Next summer don’t pluck the flowers off, they should be considered 2 year old plants now (this is technically their second summer alive—- at least that’s my understanding. On this point I’m getting mixed reports online) that’s where I’m at now, going to collect runners this year and move the bed in fall as my plants are now 4.

Sorry to dump so much info but I went from small berries devoured by slugs to 2.5 gallons in the freezer off 19 plants. We were shocked at the difference. I think the most important part was thinning them.