Strawberry runners

The strawberries were overrun with runners when we got back from a few days away.

I suppose if you grew these in a field you could let them do their own thing and wander and root at will.  Works really well on a steep slope.  Clearly this isn't an option for the average gardener.

You shouldn't let them produce more than four or five runners if you do want to make new plants from them, as it weakens the parent plant too much.  

The usual way to do this is to peg down the runners at each little plantlet so they are in contact with the soil and when you can see they are growing (and have roots) you cut the stem between them and the mother plants and move the baby either to a pot or to a new planting area.

You can also put small pots of soil around the plants and pin a plantlet attached to a runner into that and, again, when it is self-sufficient cut it away from its mom.

My method flies in the face of received wisdom but, so far, it has worked just fine.

I clean up all the bed by removing all the runners and, as quickly as I can, I choose the biggest plantlets and poke them in a pot. I need five so have rooted ten.

Strawberry plants will produce fruit for up to six years but after their second year they get less and less productive so it is wise to renew them every three or four years.  I have five plants along each side of the bed (four sides!) so I intend to begin at the front and work around the bed clockwise renewing one side each year.  Eventually I will have a mix of new plants and one, two and three year old plants in the bed each year.

This is a photo of the cleaned up bed.  We are waiting for the next batch of strawberries - there is  enough fruit and flower to do us a couple of decent puddings.  They are supposed to produce a pound of fruit per plant so twenty plants equals twenty pounds of strawberries by my reckoning when they get going properly next year. I do like these ever-bearers for living up to their name.

I have no idea if they are Albion or Calypso or a mix of both.  I had both in pots before they went to the lotty and - you guessed it - I never labelled them because I knew which was which.