How To Renovate Strawberries

Strawberries are the most vigorous perennial fruits we grow. They give and give. But they do require some attention to give at the annual robustness of a 2 year old planting.

It seems counterintuitive, but as soon as you’ve harvested your last ripe berries in early July from your June bearing plants, you have to cut them down. Yes, that’s right.

When our beds were all in-ground, we were able to use our lawnmower set high (we keep ours set to 4”) and trim off above the crown. The crown is what you don’t want to disturb, the base of the plant at ground level. It should also not be buried deeply. Now that we have the weathered steel edging throughout our orchard, it’s not as easy to maneuver a lawnmower in there so we are now renovating by hand. Definitely a little more time, but weeding is a necessary step alongside pruning back all the old green foliage.

Why do I need to do this?

Renovating strawberries serves several purposes. First and foremost, it removes disease from your bed. Strawberries have a lot of fungal diseases, and by carefully removing the leaves you can take diseases and pests out of the bed and the new growth will be less susceptible to develop the diseases.

Second, the new growth will help develop the roots, new runners, and most importantly, the fruiting buds for next year!

Finally, this is also the time to add compost and/or fertilizer to help spur this flush of growth we are looking for to continue to grow and expand and renew the strawberry patch.

I will note that for us these plantings are only a few years old — I think this is our second year harvesting from our north orchard and third from the east, though the east orchard had immense quack grass pressure last year and so we nearly removed all strawberry plants. We only harvested this year from the transplanted plants. There is a lot of room for runners to establish this summer for a more robust harvest next year.

As such, we haven’t had to take out the oldest plants yet, but if your strawberry bed is more than 3 years old and you’ve never removed the parent plants, that is also an essential step to maintaining vigor. I look for the smaller plants (last year’s runners) and would select those as my keepers, and remove the oldest, largest ones as I’m weeding.