Care of your first year plants
Your new plants will try to bloom their first spring.  For best results, carefully pick every flower off the plants so they'll put their energy into growing healthy roots and leaves instead.  Yes, that means you won't get to taste your first berry until next year --- it will be worth the wait.  Using my growing system, this first year is the only time you'll have to pick off flower buds since you'll plant new strawberries in the fall from here on out.  (Fall planted berries have generally established themselves enough that you can let them fruit their first spring.)

After trying to bloom, the strawberry plants will send out lots of runners.  Those of you following the hill system will want to snip back runners during your usual weeding sessions.  You don't need any fancy equipment as long as you catch the runners when they're young and tender --- just pinch them off between your thumb and forefinger.

Strawberry plants often keep green leaves through most or all of the winter, but you'll want to put some mulch over top of the plants once the rest of your garden has died back.  Freezing and thawing can otherwise push your berries' shallow roots up out of the ground and kill the plants.  Be sure to rake the mulch back from the tender new leaves in early spring and topdress the bed with a healthy coating of compost, topped off with the old mulch plus a new layer of straw.


Flowering and fruiting
After patiently waiting 12 months, you're ready for your strawberry harvest.  This time, leave all of the blooms and keep an eye on the weather.  Late spring freezes can damage strawberry flowers, so I toss row cover fabric over top of the plants if lows are expected to drop below 30 degrees once flower buds have opened.  You'll know your flowers were damaged if the centers change from yellow to black.  All is not lost, though --- strawberry flowers tend to open a few at a time over the course of a week or two, so losing the earliest flowers will just allow the plant to put more energy into later fruits.

While watering is important throughout the growing season, the time between fruiting and harvest is a critical period.  Strawberries need an inch of water per week, and if the weather isn't cooperating, you have to irrigate.  Otherwise, just watch and wait, picking your strawberries when they are bright red on the outside and at least slightly red clear through.  You'll need to set aside time to harvest strawberries at least every other day, but daily harvesting is better.  Berries are sweetest in the afternoon and are least tasty if picked right after a rain (or watering session.)

If you ever get sick of grazing on fresh strawberries, Weekend Homesteader: August tells how to make peach leather, a recipe that can be easily tweaked to produce the most delicious strawberry leather you've ever tasted.  Or check out recipes for strawberry freezer jam and chocolate strawberry shortcake.


Renovating and expanding the strawberries
After gorging on strawberries in May or June, it's time to start plucking runners again.  This year, you don't need to be quite as careful about removing every single runner because you'll want to expand your patch.  By the middle of summer, missed runners will have rooted and turned into new strawberry plants.  When the weather forecast promises three or more rainy days in a row, head out into the garden with your trowel and carefully dig up all of these baby strawberry plants, then start a second patch in a new garden bed.  This is another time when irrigation is critical since summer-planted strawberries can easily wither up and die before they get their feet under them.

If you use my method of expanding the patch in the late summer, you can skip this step, but otherwise you'll need to renovate your bed in the fall.  Many sources recommend mowing off the strawberry leaves, but I find that step unnecessary.  Instead, I simply rip out plants that have gotten too close together, leaving at least one foot of mulched soil between each plant.

I've found that flavor and vigor begin to diminish after a strawberry patch has fruited once, twice, or three times.  (How many seasons you can eke out of the plants depends on the quality of your soil.)  I generally eat two years' worth of strawberries from a bed, then rip the plants out and rotate the bed back into the general vegetable garden.  As long as I transplanted runners the previous year, I'll have a fresh bed ready to produce more berries the following spring.

This week's lunchtime series is exerpted from Weekend Homesteader: February, which is available for 99 cents from Amazon's kindle store.  The ebook also includes a primer on choosing and caring for a backyard flock of chickens, information on buying in bulk, and tips for creating your own apprenticeship.  If you enjoy the book, please consider leaving me a review.

This post is part of our Easy Berries lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: Easy berries Choosing and planting strawberries Maintaining a strawberry bed Choosing, planting, and training brambles Pruning and maintaining brambles

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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