no worms for me

In 2009, I bought two strawberry seedlings and planted them. They produced a handful of small strawberries that year and created a third strawberry plant via a runner. My grandmother had told me that strawberry plants can be overwintered in California, so I left them in the ground, not expecting much from them due to their lackluster performance.

Those plants decided to prove me wrong. In 2010, I ate strawberries from my garden almost every week from June through mid-September!  

I collected strawberries in metal bowls, glass bowls, plastic bags, or just my hands.

Some of them had bite-holes from pill bugs (or Armadillidiidae…. Real name. I’m serious!) and birds, so I cut off the holey sections. The berries ranged from the size of a kumquat to the behemoth that was as long as my palm (see far right photo below).

I never did taste the behemoth strawberry because I gave that to my mom. But, I’m sure it was divine. 

The strawberry plants I have are the everbearing variety (Seascape everbearing), which produce two to three harvests throughout spring, summer, and fall. Everbearing varieties apparently do not send out many runners (or “stolons”). A strawberry runner is a horizontal stem which grows a distance away from the plant of origin (the mother plant) to produce daughter plants. One runner can establish many nodes from which the daughter plants form. 

The production of runners requires energy which means that a strawberry plant producing runners has less energy to produce fruit. I had some runners and little fruit in 2009 whereas in 2010, I had plenty of fruit but no runners. I’m still trying to figure out how to encourage runners to form so that my strawberry plants can clone themselves. I believe that because I run a pretty packed planter’s box, the strawberry runners had nowhere to go and not much exposed soil to take root in.

Drip irrigation could also be a culprit because anywhere there isn’t a drip node is bone dry in the summer and fall, and I’m not sure if the daughter plants will take root if it’s too dry. I had switched over to drip irrigation because the sprays weren’t working very well for me. For the type of soil in my backyard (hard clay), spray irrigation just caused pools of water to develop over the surface of the soil and algae to grow in those puddles.

I did notice that the older strawberry plants were preferred by aphids whereas the daughter plant stayed bug-free except for Armadillidiidae and slugs that went after the fruit. Since there was only a small number of aphids, I let them be. Overall, the strawberry plants required almost no work. I kept them watered with my automatic drip system and fed them with an organic 10-10-10 fertilizer once in early spring and that was it!

Actually, I did have to protect the fruit from the terrestrial crustaceans and gastropods which seem to love my garden so much. I noticed that 98% of the fruit that touched the soil had holes in them from those a-gnawing bugs. The ones that hung in the air, supported by a mesh of leaves and stems were untouched… until I come by and pluck them for myself, that is. So, to protect the strawberries as they were forming, I tucked a few into the lower halves of cut-off water bottles. This method defended against the birds and squirrels too. Just don’t squeeze too many strawberries in the bottle because they will get bigger as they grow and could end up squishing one another.

Suffice it to say that I was really impressed by my three lovely strawberry plants. A tip for beginner gardeners: plant strawberry seedlings, water and fertilize, harvest fruit, impress family and friends. It worked for me!