The strawberries have been our big success story this summer. Surprising, really, as they have been a dead loss in years gone by.
Right now, though, they’re cropping so heavily that we can’t pick and eat them quickly enough, and even a pessimistic estimate would put the value of what we’ve had so far at about £20. You’d never buy that many in the shops, and if you did they wouldn’t taste nearly so good.
These strawberries are the most intense, fruitful berries you can imagine, and it would be very difficult going back to shop-bought ones if the crop failed next year.
But we’ve not just been lucky with the size of the crop: we’ve also been fortunate with its condition. Very few of the berries show any sign of having been nibbled by any kind of infestation, and we haven’t even needed to use straw to keep them from touching the ground.
All in all, as close to a perfect crop as you could hope, and one high point in an otherwise slightly disappointing plot.
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Don’t forget to add plenty of compost to the strawberry bed for next year in Autumn and add some fertiliser to encourage root growth over the winter.
Pot up a lot of the runners ready to replace plants or to extend the bed. Remember that your runners will fruit better in the second year and that a good strawberry plant may only last four years or so – therefore the runners are a good way of reproducing your stock.
Also remember to feed the plants with a good fertiliser in spring until they start to fruit (don’t ask me why strawberries don’t like feeding when fruiting but raspberries do – fact of life though). Strawberries need watering when they start to flower if the weather is dry to help them to set fruit.
Strawberries need a bit of care and attention to get them to do really well.
How many did you plant? We only planted a small amount and are sharing ours with snakes. Didn’t know snakes liked berries.
This year we didn’t plant any news ones – all we did was transplant the babies that had appeared at the end of the runners last autumn. Second-year strawberries are always better than first year crops.