Growing the Strawberry Collection

As we prepare for our move to our new home, one thing that I'd love to grow more of are strawberries. Our kids go crazy for them, and can easily eat around 200grams (1/2 pound) a day if allowed. While I've grown a few plants in our current home, these don't provide much of a harvest. In keeping with the simple/affordable living focus of this blog, I've decided to grow more plants off the runners. As a result, we now have almost 30 plants.

I started with the original plants in small pots, and then lined up window boxes for the runners to grow into. These were filled with premium potting mix to encourage the runners to grow roots quickly. The runners are the reddish/brownish lengths of plant between the plants in the photo below.The first step is to simply cut the runners off. While you could do this a lot earlier than I have, leaving them a bit longer allows the roots to establish quite well. Otherwise, you may find that the plant doesn't survive.


Next you lift the individual plants out. In this case I'm using some old pots that I've still got around, but some other plants I've transplanted this year I've used milk pots. These pots I'm using this time around aren't ideal, but I figure that this is temporary until I can establish a permanent strawberry bed in our new home.
With the ten plants that I replanted today, I've now got 27 plants (off the initial 3). I'm pretty happy with that many (great starting point for next summer, although some plants look like they're fruiting already), but I'll probably buy a few more plants next summer to work as replacement stock and keep that supply going! From a budget perspective, the plants cost around $2 each initially, so now my unit cost is down to around 25c!