Growing Strawberries:What you are doing wrong!

You just bought your bundles of root strawberry starts, you prepare your garden beds and plant them in neat long rows. The strawberry plants grow more leaves and a week or two after that, they blossom. Your strawberry patch is well on its way. What next? Well, the greenhouse attendant told you to pick off the blossoms the first year to get more fruit the next year. Should you?

Growing up, your Grandma’s strawberry patch was huge. Left mostly to itself the plants multiplied, runners were left to grow where they wanted and the patch produced large amounts of fruit and needed only to be weeded. Grandma didn’t pick off all the blossoms from the “new” runner plants. What was Grandma’s secret?

What should you do? Grandma’s method or the pick off all the blossom’s method? Do you sacrifice the first yield to get 20% more strawberry’s the next year, producing nothing the first year?

Wild alpine strawberries in our woods.

Why is mother nature having this plant blossom the first year? What is she thinking? The plant would grow bigger and stronger if it had no blossoms the first year, right?

Or does she know what she is doing? 

With most things on our homestead we keep it simple. We let nature do its thing.

I don’t pick the blossoms off my strawberry plants. I don’t pick off runners. I also let the runners root and grow where ever they want, this helps them establish that first year and grow a nice root system. I even let the runners grow in the walk ways if they so choose.  Every year I have new strawberry plants from the runners that grew off the plants last year. Every year I have some old plants die. Every year some plants produce a ton and others just a few berries. And every year I have work to do in the berry patch with transplanting and trying to keep it orderly. Every three years I buy a bundle or two of root starts, I like to bring new variety’s into the patch.

And every year I have a bumper crop of strawberries. 

Transplanting last years runners this spring…

I would have even less work if I grew my berry patch like Grandma did and had a large area for it with no rows.

 

Early spring here at our place, I have already transplanted any wandering runners from last year back into rows and heavily mulched the rows with hay/straw. Notice that raised bed full of lettuce this early in the season! I will do a post on letting your lettuce go to seed  for an early spring harvest, soon!

 

The rhubarb and strawberry patch early spring. Each year I add a new row of strawberry’s from all the runners I let grow up. You can see I have sheets on the fence, frost advisory’s this week.

Everything made it through the frost and 31 degrees the other night, covered with sheets, plastic or hay.

This is what last years runners look like early spring, I had to make two new rows this year because I had so many runners. And I still have these guys left to put in the ground somewhere.

Why NOT to pick off blossoms: If you buy new plants every three years like the greenhouse tells you to do and pinch off the blossoms that first year, you will have a crop only every two years. Plus a bunch of work digging out old plants and putting in new plants. But it does bring you back to the greenhouse to buy more every couple of years, making them happy!

Why is this method so widely suggested? Most large strawberry producers will plant new plants every year, it only makes sense for them to have all the ground planted with young productive plants that they buy from other farms instead of letting the runners grow up. They spend the extra time and money planting new young plants each year because they make it all back selling berries.

 So if you do the math what is the most productive method for a backyard gardener? THE ONE THAT GIVES YOU FRUIT EVERY YEAR! DUH!

Here are a few tips for a bumper crop of berries every year:

• Mulch.mulch.mulch! -around the plants, in the walkways, heavy heavy mulch!
• Water the berry patch in dry spells especially before harvest, and after too.
• Add compost twice a year at least. Feed that soil and those plants!
• Use bird netting if you have a berry patch that is not heavy with foliage.
• WEED! Don’t be lazy…those weeds will block out sun, eat up all the nutrients and crowd the strawberry root systems.
• Finally, let nature do her thing! Let the runners grow! Those are what you are buying at the green house in bundles every three years!

 

There is always more than one way to do something but I hope we can learn something from the way Grandma used to do things, with strawberries patches and with letting your lettuce go to seed in the fall for an early spring harvest! Blog post on that subject coming soon!

-J

 

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