Wood chip berries?

Gradually our strawberry bed lost vigour and wasn't really performing. Generally speaking after three productive years you need to replace plants.

At the end of 2014 we spent time reading up on varieties and ordered our chosen few.

On 5 February 2015 our first selection containing, Cambridge Favourite, Cupid, Elsanta, Fenella and Royal Sovereign, arrived from Ashridge Nurseries. A few days later on 10 February three more varieties, Malwina, Marshmello and Vibrant arrived from Marshalls. We had ten plants of each variety which were planted into pots and grown on in our garden greenhouse.

We had earmarked and prepared a bed for our new strawberries which we planted up on 7 April 2015. We hadn't intended buying 80 plants and we had decided that this bed had only enough space for six of the varieties. Malwina and Cupid had to wait until we decided on and prepared another location. These remaining two varieties were planted on 23 April.

As you can see the strawberries were planted through weed control fabric and mulched with wood chippings. Really they should be called wood chip berries rather than strawberries.

As expected 2015 was a settling in period and fruit production was low but this year as expected things vastly improved as the following chart shows.

Not all varieties passed muster though. The Vibrant strawberry plants more or less all died . One or two Elsanta died and a couple were weedy specimens and one or two Marshmello died or turned out to be weak and fruitless.

Bed 1

Fewer fruiting plants in part accounts for the lower harvest produced by Marshmello and Elsanta. I am discounting Vibrant as a write off which is disappointing as that variety along with Elsanta was the first to produce fruit.

One plant of Fenella struggled and didn't fruit but this didn't prevent Fenella from being our best performing variety.

Bed two

All the plants from the remaining varieties grew strong and healthy but in spite of producing good plants, Cambridge Favourite and Royal Sovereign didn't perform as well as I would have expected in the fruit production stakes.

Our strawberry harvest started with a trickle on 28 June and ended with a trickle on 16 August (unless we spot some more latecomers).

As can be seen from the above chart Cupid had the longest production 'season'.
Fenella started fruiting later than most of the other varieties but made up for this in the amount of berries produced. The latest to start fruiting was Malwina but this was also the last to finish fruiting although we did have three or four (literally) berries in August.

None of the berries disappointed flavourwise although the winner in the flavours stakes was without doubt Malwina.

We were not as impressed with the Royal Sovereign berries which were often misshapen and a more orange red. Even though they were amongst the best plants, berries along with those from Cambridge Favourite tended to be smaller than those of other varieties.

As the fruit began to develop, we protected the berries from birds by netting using a new (to us) softer netting that proved much easier to handle than the stiff netting that we have use in the past.

Netting doesn't however protect from slugs but, considering the damp conditions that prevailed this year, we expected that slugs would be a major problem. Fortunately the slugs didn't spoil many berries. They did make a meal of some berries which, once nibbled, were left in place for them to finished. This way they are less likely to move on to a new fruit. I also wonder whether the wood chippings prove to be less hospitable to slugs. The berries didn't rot as I had expected this year and again maybe the chippings provide a drier bed for the berries than straw. Another point is that water tends to pass through the weed control fabric rather than sitting on the surface.

The netting has now been removed in preparation for tidying up the plants. The dead leaves need cutting back and unwanted runners removed. We have already pinned some runners into pots of compost to root them. As I have already mentioned we have some gaps where plants have died and need replacing.

We have taken more runners from Malwina than any other variety as we intend to fill the gap left by Vibrant with new Malwina plants. This should give us a better harvest at the end of the season. The only other runners taken are from varieties to replace the odd dead plant.

It could be that the varieties will perform differently if the conditions next year differ from this year, for that we will have to just wait and see.

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett