What's happened to my strawberry plants?!

[LemonFrosting]

Posted yesterday in another thread but no reply.
I'm wondering why are my strawberry plants looking so awful and brown?! I thought maybe not enough water but the soil is damp. The smaller plant this morning is now even browner! It looks dead to be honest.

This is now one of the strawberry plants 😳

How can you scorch something by applying cold water?! Mother Nature has a way of pouring with rain in midsummer and then hot sunshine five minutes after, and plants have been coping with that just fine for hundreds of millions of years.

Some gardeners find that annual bedding such as petunias have flowers that droop a bit and can get spoiled after a soaking, but that is it.

I suspect that people have grown to believe this myth about water scorching leaves because of one simple thing. The forget to water early in the day, and by mid afternoon they think "Oh shit, my plants are drying out, I'd better water them", so they do that and hey presto after a couple of days the leaves have gone brown at the edges. What they haven't realised is the damage was already done. Fine feeder roots have dried out and died, and the plant hasn't been able to take up enough water, so the leaves suffer the consequences. Next morning they look at the plant and think "Oh no! The leaves are all shrivelled - what did I do differently yesterday? Oh I know, it must be because I got the leaves wet when I did the watering". Hey Presto, a myth is born.