HI

Freedom_Spark wrote:
Hi everyone, I'm a complete gardening novice & I planted two baskets of
strawberries in the greenhouse this year, three plants per basket. They
are doing great, we've already had some ripe berries & there are plenty
of new flowers coming through. When harvesting the ripe strawberries, I
just take the berry itself, leaving the remainder of the flower on top,
should I cut this off with the berry?

Your choice - we tend to nip the stalk off and then remove the greenery
once we've washed them, inside the house.... -


There are now what I assume are runners growing from each basket, maybe
ten between the two. One of my uni tutors mentioned that these can be
turned into new plants but how? Do I take them off yet? How do I make
them root? And will they survive the winter? (I assume these would be
next years plants)

Here is a photo of what I think are runners, any advice welcome, as I
said I'm a complete novice!

It's a bit more difficult as you have the baskets up in the air - but
what you need to do is to secure these new shoots by pegging them down
into small flower pots full of compost. (Maybe make up a u-shaped piece
of wire to keep the shoots in contact with the compost. Maybe you could
put up a little shelf and train a row of runners along a row of
flowerpots...?

Keep an eye on the runners - and keep the compost moist - you'll see
roots growing from the nodes where the leaves are. Once the roots are
well enough developed (probably at the end of the summer) you can snip
through the stalks to separate the new plants, and pot them up into
larger pots to over-winter.

As it gets cooler they'll die back, but should survive to grow on again
next year...

We started out with 20 strawberry plants in our tunnel 2 years ago -
we now have probably 80 of them and they're all fruiting at once !

Almost sick of the sight of strawberries !

You can ussually get 2 - 3 seasons from each plant - so don;t thow away
the ones that yuo have growing at the moment. Give them some new compost
next year and they'll fruit again for you.

Hope this helps
Adrian