Tidying up after last year: our strawberry story

Last weekend, I did a bit of tidying of the strawberry bed. We’re hoping for a slightly more successful season with the strawberries this year. There were two main reasons we think we didn’t get many strawberries last year:

1. We only bought the bare route runners quite late on in the Spring, which meant they probably didn’t get planted out until the last possible moment that they could’ve been.
2. We used weed suppressant fabric under the plants as we thought this would make growing them easier, as we wouldn’t have to weed them and the strawberries would be protected from the soil and wouldn’t get dirty as they were growing.

Turns out you need to let your strawberry plants get established before you can really expect them to produce any fruit, and weed suppressant stops the weeds, but also the water getting to the plants!

So this is the “before” photo:

The first thing I did was strip off the weed suppressant. Then I tidied each plant, removing all the dead leaves and vegetation.

I then made sure that all the plants were still rooted in properly, and that there were no bare roots showing. Where there were any roots showing, I pulled some more soil up round the roots and firmed this down.

There were a couple of plants that hadn’t made it through the winter, so I replaced them with some that we have taken as runners and overwintered in pots.

Once they were all tidied up, I gave them a good soak with water around them. A week on, they are already looking much healthier and are starting to make some more new growth.

I will keep watering them regularly to make sure they have enough moisture to really get going as the weather warms up.