[sclarke624]

My Elsanta has loads of foilage and the strawberries are small this year, except on one or two pots.  Maybe the bigger strawbs are bigger cos they are new pottings.  Do they get smaller when two years or three years old.

I did the same as last year and defoilated a bit, so the bees could find the flowers and the sun reach the stawb fruits.

[Trillium]

Strawberries definitely deteriorate by 3 years old, and are finished around 5, which is why it's important to either replace with new ones or keep your runners going. Older plants may produce runners for a few more years but a very poor cropping, if any.

[rao]

I currently have three strawberry beds on my allotment.
A two year old bed of variety "Alice".
A two year old bed of variety "Albion". (Perpetual)
A one year old bed of half "Alice" and half "Albion".
All the plants were grown from runners and planted out the previous early Autumns.
All three beds have the same conditions.
By March this year the plants in the new bed were bigger and stronger than the older plants.
All three beds are now cropping.
The strawberries from the new bed are better both in size and quantity than the older beds.
This is particularly apparent with the perpetual variety.
I know that commercial growers plant new every year and root out the old bed.
If I can produce enough new plants from runners then I shall be planting new every year.
The only problem is that the perpetual variety does not produce many runners.
Last year, the parent bed only produced enough runners for half a new bed so I may have to buy in a few new plants to make it work.
To be honest, I'm not overly impressed with the perpetual variety, but the attraction with them is that they produce fruit until late September, albeit at a much reduced level.
All the gardening books talk about keeping strawberry beds for three years with the second year the best.
Based on my experience, I'm no longer sure.
Has anybody grown perpetual strawberries and kept them for three years?
I cannot find much useful information about them so any help would be appreciated.


 

[sclarke624]

Strawberries definitely deteriorate by 3 years old, and are finished around 5, which is why it's important to either replace with new ones or keep your runners going. Older plants may produce runners for a few more years but a very poor cropping, if any.

Does the deterioation (sp LOL) apply to the taste though I wonder.

[Trillium]

Not really as it all depends on what you've fed the soil, if at all. But berry size is often smaller and I find older plants tend to produce more gnarled berries or smaller seedier ones.

[Paul Plots]

Seven and a half pounds picked so far this year so jam pots filling nicely...

Having got the basics of this strawberry growing lark I need to sit down with the book and decided what to do next...

a) prepare and pant a new bed from runners
b) leave it one more year (probable choice as I think this is the 2nd year for most of the plants)
c) dig the lot out at the end of the season and buy a couple of named varieties for a new bed

Decisions decisions.... 

[vet]

Having made the mistake of keeping older strawberry plants I,m going to pot on the runners this year. I dug up my strawb bed as the weeds had got to much. Some of the smaller new runners never got replanted and I left them sitting in one of the raised beds. All the runners in the raised bed rooted themselves and started growing away quite happily so I left them to it. They are better looking plants and producing more strawberries than the main bed. I think there's a moral in this somewhere