Starting to think about next year already!

Now that the strawberries have stopped producing fruits, it is time to think about planning for next year’s crop. This doesn’t take much thinking about, as the plants do this all by themselves, by starting to throw “runners”. These are elongated stems which grow leaves and roots out periodically with the aim of finding some nice soil to anchor themselves in and produce more plants next season.

To ensure the strawberry bed is kept in an orderly fashion, we pot the runners up rather than letting them root wherever takes their fancy. First, we filled several 3″ pots with a little bit of soil to give the pots some weight.

Then we filled the pots to the top with some multipurpose compost.

Lastly, we identified the runners we wanted to pot up, and pushed their root nodules into the surface of the compost, holding them down with a U-shape of plastic coated wire.

The job was finished off by giving each pot a good watering to settle the runner in. We will keep watering them regularly now until the runners start to root.