Perhaps a silly question here - what size crop would you expect from a strawberry plant? I'm afraid that mine are cheat ones from the garden centre 
and I don't know what type they were. I only bought two but I can now see that I'm only going to get a handful of fruits from them.
I also didn't cut off the runners because I've pinned them down into pots of compost in the hope that I can get a few more plants in order to get a larger stock for next year after overwintering. Haven't checked on them in a couple of days so Ive probably got runners running out of my proverbial!
Asherweef
I'm no strawberry expert, but here's what I've found by trial-and-error and by reading a few articles....
Strawberries give their best yields in years 2, 3 and 4. The first year is usually pretty rubbish, and yields go down from year 5, after which it's recommended to dig them up. In the first year, I read that is advisable to remove runners as this puts too much of the plant's energy into the runners. I also think I read you should remove flowers to make the strawberries stronger the following year (although we didn't do this last year as we wanted strawberries!). Based on my own experience - when I moved to the house I live in now, about 4 years ago, there was a strawberry patch about 1.5m x 1.5m with around 10-12 plants. We got around 10kg from these plants - probably more, as this is just what we weighed when we pciked bowlfuls and does not count the ones we ate straight off the plants each day! I assume these were 2nd or 3rd summer plants, as the next year we got slightly less (maybe about 6-8 kg) and the year after, much much less. So that year, I pegged in runners and got about 15 new plants which I potted up and left in the greenhouse over winter.
The recommendation is to not to replant strawberries in the same place as it encourages disease, but I had no other place to plant them. So in the Autumn, I completely dug out the strawberry plot (it's a raised bed), removing all plants and soil and half-filled the bed with manure and half with compost. Then, the following spring, I planted out the 12 strongest plants of which 11 gerw very well last year. We got about 3-4 kg last year, but lost a similar amount I think because of the wet weather (lots rotted, and we simply could not stay on top of the slugs). This year, things are looking very good indeed.....
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June 07, 2013, 12:57