We haven’t bought any strawberry plants this year. We haven’t needed to: we planted a dozen or so last summer and only got about the same number of fruits in return. Quite lousy.

That pretty much decided us not to buy any more for 2009 but at the end of last summer, when we tidied up the plot for winter, we looked at the state of the strawberry patch and saw why the fruit crop had been so poor: rather than trying to reproduce by creating seeds, the plants had instead concentrated on putting out feelers and growing offspring at the end of each one.

As a result, our 12 plants had more or less doubled to 24.

So we made sure that the new plants were well seated, trimmed the branches linking them to their parents and sat back to see what would happen. If they died we hadn’t lost anything; if they didn’t it was a bonus.

Well, they didn’t. They had a quiet, sick looking winter but, seemingly overnight, they’ve all shot up in height and every plant is now sporting delicate white flowers that hint at fruit to come.

I had read that strawberry plants are better in their second year in the ground, and I’m hoping that this is the proof we need. Perhaps we were right to give them a second chance.

Fingers crossed.

Related posts:

1. Strawberries
2. They may still be green, but they’re strawberries
3. Replanting the strawberry patch