Advice on strawberries please.

rms1

This was our first summer growing strawberries. We bought about 20 plants and were please with the crop that we got although we would have liked them to have gone on producing for longer.

We now have quite a lot of runners trring to establish themselves into the ground. Should we be pleased about this and leave them to it or should we be controlling them in some way.

wssla00

best thing to do is to make sure they touch the earth, by perhaps pegging them down until they root, then cut the runner off the parent plant and hey presto you have another strawberry plant for free

alleycat`

I usually peg the runner down into a small pot full of compost.
Let it establish and then cut it free.
Once that is done i move them to a cold frame.
Letting them bed into the ground tends to make things congested (i personally find).

GreenFly_2

One more thing to add is the that the runners will start to bud at each node, you can peg the runner down at each of these nodes, however this depletes the energy in the parent plant, so I would leave the pegging down to one or maybe two nodes only.

GF

Smoffi

the more runners you have the less strawberries you get... so use a few to fruit and a few to expand.. and then swap them about each year.. (the plant only lasts 3 years..)

cjb02

If you only want 20 plants and just let them produce fruit, then remove all runners and they will produce fruit. removing runners means the plants can produce more fruit, could be up to 25% more fruit, depends on variety.

If you want fruit and more plants, then you could either let half produce runners and half produce fruit or let each plant produce one or two new plants and then no more. your choice.

I bought 20strawberry plants from fleabay this year, 8quid delivered, variety albion. it is an everbearer type.

I want more plants so I am forgoing strawberries this year in favour of more plants. I have read up on the variety and if I de-runner them, they can produce I think "upto" a kilo of fruit per plant. nice. but If I have runners. it wont get any where near that.

This is my wiki entry page here on potting on runners. it is very simple and straight forward but personal choice