Strawberries!

[JennyPenny23]

Hi, I want to plant some stawberries in the garden asap as we go through loads of them. Does anybody have any recomend the best ones? Or if I planted a few different types of strawberries would they produce at slightly different times? Just thinking a steady amount over a few weeks would be better than hundreds of them all in one week.

I have lots of different fruit and vege planted in the garden that I am hoping to grow but th strawberries are the top of my priority as we all love them! It would save us a fortune if we could just get them from the garden!

I'd get a few different varieties for a slightly longer season. It also gives you some alternatives if you decide you're not so keen on one particular variety! Depending on whether you want your garden over run, you might want to look out for varieties bred not to produce runners. I had a couple of little wild strawberry plants - and the next year I had a flower bed full of the things...

Don't worry too much about getting them spread out, though, as strawberries tend to keep producing flowers for a while so you don't tend to get a massive glut in the way you often do with other fruit.

Good luck

Thanks. I have a large garden with a large vege patch and also several raised beds etc that are currently empty (we just moved in and I am new to gardening!). So I am quite happy for them to spread. TBH it would take a LOT of stawberries for us not to be able to eat them all. Both my DDs will happily eat a punnet before we even get back from the supermarket! They are the same with all berries really actually!

Strawberry plants will produce runners at the expense of fruit, so it's always better to remove them as soon as you see them. Then towards the end of the season you can allow one or two per plant to spread (best way is to choose a strong looking runner then stretch it away from the plant and peg it to the ground so it develops roots quickly).

Plants will keep going for years, but after the first 3-4 years the quality and yield of fruit does tend to drop, so best to replace them every now and then.

Give them plenty of feed, and make sure you put in lots of compost before planting as they are hungry plants (unless you have wild strawberries). If birds are a problem consider netting. The wild/alpine strawberries are delicious but tend to be squishy, so best for making jam with a gorgeous and very intense flavour. OTOH you need masses of them for this!

Some modern cultivars are bred to have upright fruits, which keeps thhem off the ground away from slugs and mud etc, but I've no idea if the flavour is as good as the usual type.

Thanks! I got 2 packs today from the garden centre. The only 2 they had. They both recomend planting in hanging baskets. Has anybody tried this? I am pretty sure there are a couple of spare hanging baskets in one of the sheds, left behind by the previous people who lived here and plenty of hooks on the walls and fences for them.

We have LOTS of compost. More compost than anything else which is our problem!

I've stuck mine in a strawberry pot this year. I think the advantage of putting them in a pot/basket is that the fruit tends to hang into space, so stays fairly clean, and its off the ground, so you get fewer slug/snail attacks. Just watch out that they don't get too dry or hungry!

yes I did worry about the slugs ad snails as we seem to have loads of them in our garden! Maybe I will give the hanging baskets a go. I will have a look to see how many I can find! I will plant some in the ground as well and also in some pots maybe.