Keen on growing strawberries? Winter is an excellent time to get them planted in the garden.
Are you growing strawberries yet?
Winter is a great time to get some strawberries in your garden. Strawberries need a period of cold to ensure they flower and fruit well.
Planting them early will allow them to establish stronger roots before spring. In spring they can put their energy into flower production.
Strawberry Site
Choose a nice sunny spot to plant your strawberries. The more sun, the bigger and better they'll be. Try to aim for a minimum of 6 hours.
Ensuring you have a good soil starting base is key if you want lots of delicious strawberries. It needs to have good drainage and be full of nutrients.
There's no need for shop-bought stuff though, you can make it yourself. Use organic materials such as compost, rotted manure, chopped seaweed and leaf mould and this will help produce a bumper crop.
Keep your strawberries well mulched too to retain moisture and nutrients.
Strawberry flowers
As the first flowers start coming through in spring on your smaller plants, you can remove the first lot if you like.
This will push the plant to produce larger flowers in late spring and summer.
Strawberry runners
After they finish fruiting, strawberries will send out runners. How many of these runners you keep is up to you. Some people choose to snip most runners off to allow the parent strawberry plant to put its energy into establishing itself as opposed to growing offspring.
I suggest letting at least a few runners grow. Strawberries do their best fruiting in the first three years, after that you can replace the older plants with a new runner.
Happy gardening!
Carrie says
Will be doing this in my garden next week. Thanks for the blog 🙂
Louise says
So no dig works for strawberries as well? Do you ever use a commercial strawberry compost!? I think I have now done too much reading about strawberries and have confused myself! Lol. Do you not need to mound in a no dig Garden as it is already elevated enough?
Elien says
Hey yup no-dig works great for strawberries. I don’t use commercial strawberry mix, just homemade compost and plenty of aged manure! Then I mulch them well. I don’t bother mounding mine but you can if you want to!
Louise says
Thanks for that 😊
Talita says
Hi There, I have been growing strawberries for years but now they have become over run with oxalsis I thought if I put black polythene down this might kill all the weeds. But people are plastic free these days. Should I dig out all the soil and start again? The bed is in a contained concrete ditch./
Elien says
Hey if it were me I’d remove the strawberries, cover the oxalis with a cardboard layer and then 20cm of compost, aged manure, chopped seaweed, shredded leaves etc...
Then plant the strawberries directly back into that
Talita says
Thanks you that sounds easy.