What's wrong with my strawberries?

ixwood

Out of interest, what mistakes?

I do feel garden centres and plant retailers in general employ some pretty dubious sales tactics and exploit newbies and peoples general lack of knowledge about plants.

Primrose

Strawberries are very hardy plants and during the winter it's natural for the older leaves to go brown and die off. Snip them off and dispose of them now new leaves are starting to growing. Make sure the soil doesn't dry out once the new leaves start appearing and if possible give them a dressing of well rotted horse manure or some other kind of organic fertiliser.
Strawberries plants are supposed to last for 3 years, after which they're supposed to be replaced. Some of mine are probably five years old and I no longer know which are which as some are original plants and some are newer plants from runners. I've manured them this spring; they seem to be growing again so I will give them a reprieve and see what sort of crop they produce before digging them all up and starting again.

ixwood

Don't dig them all up. Rotate. A lot will be new plants. Take some runners this year and then replace some of the plants with those and keep going that way.

rosie383

Ixwood. One mistake I made was pruning all my raspberry canes which were sold to me as ready to fruit last summer ( that was a bloomin joke!!!!). Not a dickie bird on them. So I pruned them to get lovely new growth this year and now know from this forum, that I will now have to wait until next year to get any fruit!
Mind you, my friend just dug some canes out of her garden which fruit nicely, and there aren't any leaves on them from last year, but she assures me I should get fruit. My ones that I pruned before winter have lots of lovely fresh growth.
Weather is miserable, so I'm hoping I can leave it a few more days to get the old leaves off my strawberries. Is it only the brown leaves I take off? There are a lot of green leaves from last year which look healthy. Presumably these are needed to make food for this year?