We won’t be buying strawberry plants next year. We bought them this year, and the year before, and the few fruits that they yielded were the sweetest, most intense strawberries either of us had ever tasted.
Strawberries aren’t best on plants in their first year, though, so we’ve planned carefully for keeping this year’s plants alive through the winter and into 2009 for what we hope will be a better harvest next year. With that in mind I headed out with the trowel to tidy up the strawberry patch.
Strawberry plants replicate in two ways: they coat the skins of their fruits with seeds, and they send out shoots that grow new roots, leaves and, ultimately, fruit. As autumn has worn on, our plants have put these out in abundance, so that by today the whole patch was a tangle of arms and shoots.
Untangling them proved to be tricky, but very worthwhile. Last year we planted 12 plants: six in a strawberry planter and six in the patch. Today, I took 20 new plants off the shoots, and counted another 15 or so still in the ground, either where we had planted them in spring, or where they had self-rooted from the original six.
This is a bit of a problem, as it means that once I’d trimmed off the ones that hadn’t self-rooted and I couldn’t find a space for without detaching them from their parent plants, they could easily have stretched out of the strawberry patch and into the parts of the plot where we normally grow beans.
So I’ve transplanted them into the same bed as the blackcurrant, redcurrant, raspberry and crab apple, which if they take will be lovely. That’s right where we sit in the summer, so if there’s a bed full of fruit beside us we can reach out and pick them off when we fancy a nibble.
In total, then, we now have about 35 strawberry plants in situ for 2009, from an initial investment of just 12. That’s not a bad rate of return… if they all survive and produce fruit.
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