How to grow strawberries

Strawberry is a perennial fruit that home gardeners grow as a permanent bed rather than a crop replanted each year, spreading from a handful of mother plants into a full patch through runners. University of Minnesota Extension notes one June bearing plant can send out up to 120 daughter plants in a season, which is how a few starts fill a bed within a year or two under the matted row system. Because the crop returns each spring from the same planting, it rewards upfront restraint: newly set plants have their flowers pinched off for the first few weeks so energy goes into roots and leaves instead of a weak first crop.

The hardest part of growing strawberries well is managing the runners that make the bed possible. Left alone, a vigorous planting fills in wall to wall, and University of Georgia Extension warns that mother plants carried over without thinning develop crowded, branched crowns that produce many small berries instead of fewer full sized ones. A second year gardener who lets every runner root, rather than renovating the bed after harvest by tilling out roughly two thirds of the plants, gets a lush patch of smaller fruit that invites rot in wet weather.