New strawberries for next year?

The main activity on the plot at the moment is tidying and clearing. One area - the strawberry beds was in desperate need of tidying although you really need to see what the beds were like before my efforts at tidying up to appreciate how much better they look so here is the 'before' photograph complete with a self sown buddleia plant.

And here is what they look like now:

You may still be able to spot the buddleia in the second bed - I haven't decided what to do with it yet. The new bed will be prepared over winter and the old beds kept going next year until the new plants are producing well. At the moment the 'new strawberry bed' looks like this.

The existing strawberry beds have been in place for over three years and so we thought it was time to create a new bed. We have ordered four varieties, Marshmello (which we know is good main variety), Marshmarvel (a new early variety), Amelia (a late variety) and Finesse (a new everbearing variety).

These along with our alpines should give us a long picking season. We have sown new alpine strawberry seeds this year - we grow new plants every year -and the young plants are growing on in a nursery bed. We have found that alpine's need replacing fairly regularly and they are easily grown from seed - in fact some of the newly grown plants have already produced one or two berries and there are also a few self sown seedlings amongst this years plants. The variety is Mignonette which seems to be the easiest variety to find.

The alpines were still flowering up to this weekend but I guess the frost (yes it has reached us now!) of Sunday night has blackened the flowers and put paid to any more fruits.

We could have propagated Marshmello from runners taken from our old strawberry plants but we made the mistake of growing different varieties too close together and consequently it is difficult to tell which variety the runners have come from.

We’ll be more careful in future but it is a good to buy new stock from time to time. (Click here for more information on how we propagate and grow our strawberries).

I had considered planting the strawberries through weed suppressant membrane as the straw seems to encourage lots of weed growth but I have a few concerns such as -

• Would it harbour more slugs?
• How do I feed the plants?
• Does the soil become sour?
• Is it harder to weed once the weeds grow probably alongside the plants through the planting hole

As you can see lots of doubts so it's likely that it will be back to straw unless anyone has another idea about a suitable mulch!

Last week's diary entry is now posted on my website here and a photo album of our allotment taken last week is here