With summer memories fast fading, you’d be forgiven for not having next year’s strawberry harvest uppermost in your mind. However, this is an important month for our favorite berries. The payback is healthier plants with sweeter, juicer and more plentiful fruits for longer.
It’s worth mentioning early on that there are three main groups of strawberry plants: summer fruiting; perpetual fruiting or everbearing; and all-season or day-neutral varieties. As the names suggest, summer fruiting plants ripen in midsummer (or earlier in warmer regions of the US) in one flush, while everbearing strawberries will produce sporadic bursts of berries all summer until the first frosts. All-season varieties have been bred to grow and fruit at any time of year, as long as the temperature is at least 50°F (10°C), although it must be said they’re not the tastiest of the three groups.
How you grow strawberries will depend a little on which one of these three types you have in your backyard, although most of the basic principles remain the same. It’ll be a while before you see results, so if you need a little something to motivate you, pop this cute pink harvest basket set in your cart at Amazon and just imagine them overflowing with juicy strawberries next summer. Here are the five jobs you need to be getting on with now for that dream harvest.
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1. Tidy Up Your Strawberry Beds And Pots
(Image credit: Pavel Rodimov / Alamy Stock Photo)
It’s time to weed your strawberry beds, making sure you remove any long tap roots such as dandelions entirely or they’ll pop up again next spring – here I find a simple weed puller like this one from Lowes really handy. At the same time I get out any debris and rotting mulch that’s built up over the year, as this can harbor diseases.
Next up, remove any runners you don’t want to keep (see below), cutting them away at the crown with a sharp pair of pruners. I like to use a small pair like these 2in Digz Garden Snips from Home Depot, designed for precision cutting. Of course, keep any plantlets that look good and healthy and come away with their roots intact.
While I’m doing my general tidy, I thin out my plants to 6-12in (30-60cm) apart.
Both of these jobs mean you’re reducing competition for the plants that remain, which will give you bigger and better fruit.
Tidying up will help with diseases too. Strawberry plants can be susceptible to a few different viral infections, spread either by insects or by pests such as eelworms in the soil.
If you see yellow-blotched or crumpled foliage, and poor growth, it’s best to dig up and dispose of those infected plants, then replant with fresh stock. If you’re growing in pots, refresh the compost to reduce the risk of diseases spreading.
I get rid of dead or dying leaves next, to let in light and minimise hiding places for pests like slugs and snails. If you’re growing summer-fruiting strawberries, you can take off most of the older leaves too, to reinvigorate the plant and encourage new growth. I like to be fairly brutal here, cutting each summer-fruiting plant back to a small palm-sized mound containing just a couple of leaves of new growth.
I also refresh the top few inches of compost in any containers – it’s an important step when growing strawberries in pots and hanging baskets, and keeps nutrients at optimal levels.
2. Propagate New Strawberry Plants From Runners
(Image credit: Getty/lucentius)
This is a fun job to being doing in September. Making new plants from old always seems like performing magic, and strawberry plants are very obliging when it comes to giving you something for nothing. Here’s how to grow strawberries from runners.
First, take a look at your strawberry plants and, whether they’re in the ground or in pots, you’ll notice many will have sent out long runners by now. To make these into new plants, choose four or five strong ones from each plant and cut off and discard the rest.
Next, I fill a bunch of small pots with moist potting compost and sink them into the soil around my strawberry plants (or pop them next to my pots). Then it’s simply a question of setting those runners down into the pots and pegging them down so they have a chance to root. I use pieces of gardening wire bent into an upside-down U shape, but you can get special strawberry anchor clips like these from Amazon.
If there’s room in the beds around my plants I just peg them directly into the soil. You can always move them later if you like.
Once rooted (I give them a month or two at least and water if the weather’s dry), it’s time to cut off the long runners and replant your new plants wherever you want them to grow.
If you found ready-rooted baby plantlets during your strawberry bed tidy-up, these can be planted straight into pots or beds.
3. Plant New Strawberry Plants
This snippet is for those gardening in USDA Zones 8-11, where the climate is reliably warm. The rest of us should generally wait until early spring to put in new bare-root plants. If you haven’t already, do research some of the best strawberry varieties to grow.
Where the weather is warm enough and winters mild, it’s worth planting bare-root strawberries in fall, especially summer-fruiting varieties (ever-bearing varieties can wait until spring, although you can buy everbearing strawberry bushes now at Trees.com (formerly Fast Growing Trees), which gives the plants time to establish over winter and then produce a spring harvest.
If you’re buying bare roots, they may look a little worse for wear, but don’t worry. I soak mine for half an hour or so in a bucket before I plant. Then I space them around 12in (60cm) apart, making sure that the crown of the plant sits exactly at the surface of the soil. Any lower and they can rot; higher and they can dry out. I’m also careful to gently spread out those roots into the planting hole.
When planting into pots, I use a rich compost like Wakefield Biochar from Lowes, mixed with a little vermiculite – Viagrow from Lowes is ideal – for extra drainage.
The final step, of course, is to water your new plants in well.
4. Feed Your Strawberry Plants
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September is a good time to top-dress your summer-fruiting strawberry beds with a couple of inches of garden compost, or a good store-bought option. A few handfuls of bone meal sprinkled over the top of that is a good idea too.
You can buy bone meal at Home Depot. You can also add a Nitrogen-rich fertiliser such as Espoma Citrus Tone from Home Depot to promote leafy growth.
Any fertilising needs to be done at least 4-6 weeks before the first frosts to give your plants the chance to grow and make use of that boost before the cold weather sets in. So bear this in mind if you garden where there are early frosts.
5. Keep Plants Watered
Although rains tend to arrive in early fall, September can still be relatively dry, so keep an eye on the weather and don’t presume that just because you’ve had a couple of showers your strawberry plants can be left to their own devices.
Strawberries in pots (if you’re short on space you can’t go wrong with this stackable Vertical Planter Tower from Amazon) are especially vulnerable to drying out. Check with your finger and if the soil feels dry about in inch down, it’s time to water.
New plants and runners need particular care and attention now, or all your work pegging them down and planting them out will be in vain.
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Heirloom Strawberry Seeds
Summer-fruiting strawberry plants in particular need a good dose of TLC in September to fruit well next year.
Trust me, all your attention clearing beds, cutting back and fertilising will make all the difference, giving you better harvests next summer, and juicier berries too.
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