[fishwife]

As a new allotment owner, I need advice from someone with experience! Help! Why are all the strawberries on my plants turning blotchy brown and falling off the plants? I planted them in the autumn to get them established ( as advised by the book I bought) but they have no sage advice on my current problem. Anyone out there with help for a lonely soon to be strawberryless newcomer? :!:

[Gwiz]

can you give anymore information? strawberrys often fail for many reasons. the fruits often drop of because they are splashed with soil from either watering or rain, this causes them to rot and fall of. the old way of stopping this was to place straw under and around the plants so that the forming berrys lay on the straw and not the soil (hence the name i suppose). at this time of year with the heat and the rain, if the plants are too close together a micro climate can be caused that can encourage fungal diseases such as botritus ( have i spelt that right? it is quite early! ) you should only plant 15 to 18 inches apart in rows almost twice that distance (according to my "bible" by a bloke called george seddon) having said that his book was written years ago and there is no doubt many different schools of thought on all aspects of gardening.
all the same i hope you get the problem sorted and you at least save some of those loverly berrys! good luck!

[comic_muse]

Sounds like Gey Mould/Botrytus.....the recent wet weather won't have helped...I'd pick the damaged fruits off & put them in the refuse ( not compost ) bin.....it's just one of those things.  Damage through slugs, birds nipping into fruit etc will make the situation worse, but if it's there, it's there because like most fungal thing's, they're darned difficult to clear.  If you pick the fruits off & it dry's up, which it's forecast to do, you could give them a 'careful' feed to fire them up & they may crop again....or simply carry on cropping in dryer conditions without it reoccuring.

[John]

Bit of a nightmare for moulds and suchlike at the moment.  The only thing I can add to comic_muse's post is to make sure you have cleaned them up. Get any dead leaves out and weeds - good airflow will help keep the mould down / away.

[noshed]

Ate six huge strawberries last night - still warm from the sun.

[SweetPea]

I have a couple of rouge strawberry plants growing in a tiny gap next to the greenhouse.  They are covered in fruits, despite my attempts to ignore them at every opportunity (I can't stand them!).  They seem to thrive on the neglect - they certainly look like the healthiest plants in the garden :roll: