Seedy, tiny strawberries!
ck_gardener
Posts: 25
I have just moved from a garden where I piled on compost and harvested plump soft and sweet strawberries with little thought.......
So I get to a new garden and plant a new strawberry bed about 5 x 8 foot with 2 types of strawberry. One was grown from seed, and called Four Seasons. The other was from the local market (can't remember the "make"). Both however, have gone leafy - ie leaves are large. The stalks with fruit on are thin and spindley (can't hold themselves up from the ground), but runners are thick and hard. There are now (August) lots of flowers but the fruits are all smaller than a baby broad bean. When I picked the first few red fruits, they rattled together in my hand (very seedy on the outside). The last few weeks have has been rainy but this has not helped.
I have therefore been working on them a lot - cut out all runners: spread them out so they have 18-20 inches between; fed the soil with lots of compost. The new bed is now about 5 x 12 foot. It has been raining a lot.....
However, although the fruit are now slightly bigger they are still hardly worth picking - even the slugs and snails are not bothering with them.
Please, is there any advice for how I could make the end of season harvest better?
Posts
Sad strawberry pic
Yes, but what is the flavour like? You have an alpine variety there. The strawberries will never be bigger.
My advice is to position those plants all round the garden as a nice surprise as you wander about and buy some named varieties from a catalogue or trusted source.
If you want 'normal' sized strawberries, good ones I can vouch for include Cambridge Favourite (as old as the hills) and Elsanta. Honeyoye is a bit earlier and heavy cropping and a decent late cropper is Florence, at least in the first 2 years. I'm trying Mara des Bois as an 'everbearing' type but this is their first year and not much of a crop.
Hi BobTheGardener and Welshonion and Philippa,
I think you were all good in your diagnosis, thanks!
I removed all the runners, and cut off the bigger leaves, and fed the bed again. I am now starting to get a few bigger and less seedy fruit, but still the plants look like they are establishing themselves.