Q & A: Why Aren't My Strawberry Plants Producing Fruit?
Q - My strawberries are in their 4th year growing in an outdoor bed; fruit has been very poor this year despite feeding them, what is going wrong?
Apart from the fact that this spring and summer (so far) have been cold without the warmth and sunshine needed for good fruiting, the beds in the photo look a little cramped. Strawberries won't fruit well if overcrowded, so beds do need tidying every year to keep them productive.
Individual plants also reduce in vigour after 3 or 4 years, so it is a good idea to propagate a stock of new ones every year.
I am assuming the plants are the more common June or Summer bearing varieties, which should mean that they are towards the end of their fruiting cycle in mid-July. At this point runners are produced, which will grow new daughter plants where the nodes touch bare soil.
This is how strawberry plants are propagated, and why beds get easily overcrowded. If we have a dense mix of unproductive old plants and potentially productive new ones, they are all competing for moisture and nutrients and therefore none of them do well.
In an old, unproductive bed, I think it is better to propagate new plants and to move the strawberry bed to a new location in the garden. Old plants - which are easily identified as they have larger, more crowded crowns - should be discarded.
Vitax Organic Liquid Strawberry Feed 1L
View ProductNew stock can be built using the most vigorous of the current season's plants, or from daughter plants produced by this year's runners. Established daughter plants can be simply dug up and moved, while new non-rooted runners can be pinned into a pot of moist compost where they will root in 4-6 weeks.
Once established, potted daughter plants can be removed by cutting the connecting runner.
Whether planting a new bed or tidying an old one, we want a spacing of 45cm between rows and plants. Plants can be left to grow on until August, when they can be cut back to just above the crown. With the leaves out of the way, we can now feed the soil for the following season by adding a dressing of well rotted compost or manure around each plant.
As regards the lousy spring and early summer, I highly recommend growing undercover in a polytunnel or greenhouse: the yield and fruit quality is much, much better.
