How to Grow Strawberries: Renovating an Old Strawberry Bed

 [music intro] David Handley:  Hello, I'm David Handley. I'm the vegetable and small fruit specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension and we're going to talk about renovating an old strawberry bed. And how, in just a few steps, you can bring an old strawberry bed back to life and keep it fruiting year after year after year. Now, the renovation process should really begin in a strawberry bed the minute you say, "I've picked the last berry I want to pick this season." So typically, here in Maine, we're starting this process toward the end of July and maybe as late as early August. But you don't want to go much later than that because as you'll see when we get through this renovation process, the bed is going to need some time to recover, to build up, and give us a good crop for next year. Now, we're starting here and right after we finished our last harvest, and what we want to do is go with our first step, which is to pull out a few weeds. Undoubtedly as the season progressed and you're through with your harvest, you noticed a few weeds starting to come up in the bed. Your first step is to get rid of these weeds as best as possible. And this is just a process of hand pulling. You want to concentrate on the weeds that are in the middle of the bed because we're going to be using a tiller to take care of the weeds on the side of the bed. So step one, get rid of those weeds in the center of the bed. The next step is to go through and mow off the leaves that remain behind here. And you can do this with a regular lawn mower, but you want to set it up high because what we're trying to do here is to cut off most of the leaves, but we want to leave the crowns, the top of the crowns nice and safe. If we cut off the top of the crowns, we've killed the plant. So get as many of the leaves as you can. You're not going to get all of them, but try to get as many as you can by setting the mower up high and mowing these off. These leaves are going to die anyway. And as they die, these overwintering, decaying leaves can carry over diseases that will give us problems on our fruit next year. Also, these crowns are about to throw out a whole new series of leaves. So we're trying to encourage that new growth to come up by mowing off these old leaves. So step two, mow off your leaves. Step three, this is the time of the year to put your bulk fertilizer down. Oftentimes with perennial plants, we think we should fertilize in the spring, but with strawberries, we're concentrating on fruit development in the spring and if we put too much fertilizer on them, we get a lot of vegetative growth, our fruit gets soft, and we have a lot of rot problems. So this is the time at renovation to put the bulk of your fertilizer down. How much? Well, your soil test should tell you that and you can have a soil test and you can see a videotape of soil testing elsewhere on this website. A maintenance application for most strawberry beds would be about 20 pounds of 10‑10‑10 per 1,000 square feet. In other words, what you're trying to do is get on 2 pounds of nitrogen, 2 pounds of phosphorous and 2 pounds of potassium per 1,000 square feet. What's 1,000 square feet? Well, figure your row is about 2 feet wide, so you can do 500 feet of row with 20 pounds of that material. So if you want to use an organic fertilizer instead of a 10‑10‑10, you can do that. Just look at the product, look at the bag. It will tell you right on there what percentage of nitrogen, phosphorous, and/or potassium is in there. Work that to figure out how much you need to use to put on 2 pounds of each per 1,000 square feet. Here's where we do the actual thinning process. This is where we want to thin down the plant population to allow new plants to come out and root this summer to give us a crop for next year. And we do that with a rototiller. And what we're going to do is take this bed, as you can see, it's gotten out a little wider than I like to see it, probably about 2 ½ to 3 feet wide, and we're going to narrow this bed to only about 10 to 12 inches by taking out the two sides and leaving the middle. Then new runner plants are going to form and fill out those edges again and they'll fruit for us next year. So after we've mowed and put our fertilizer down, we can take a small rototiller and we can just go up one side and come back and come down the other leaving that 12‑inch strip in the middle. Or, as you'll see, you can use a larger rototiller and just take out the two center tines and go right over the row, taking out the two edges and leaving the middle. Now, if we've set our rototiller properly, we're doing a number of things here. We're cutting out the crowns that have rooted outside the row, that we want, OK? Those are being incorporated. We're also incorporating all those old leaves that we mowed off, so they'll break down in the soil and won't carry over diseases, and we're incorporating that fertilizer we put down and that's putting it right in the root zone where the plants can get to it. And we also want to set it deep enough and the speed fast enough that it's throwing a little bit of soil over the crowns that we leave behind. Because in addition to new leaves, these crowns are also going to be throwing out new roots as the summer progresses. And those new roots tend to come up above where the old roots were. So that plant essentially pushes itself out of the soil a little bit every year and we want to compensate for that by just putting a little bit of soil back over the plants in the middle. We don't want to bury the crowns. These aren't seeds, they're bulbs. We just want to build up the soil around them a little. And if the rototiller doesn't do that as well as you'd like, just get an iron rake and rake a little bit of soil around those crowns to build them up a little bit more. And that's it. At that point, you'll see you have a nice, narrow bed, nice and trimmed. Essentially, it will look like the planting year all over again where you've narrowed up the bed, you've just got a few crowns, that's going to fill out by using runner plants. And you should do this every year of the life of the strawberry bed, with the exception of the planting year to keep this bed going. We renovate every summer after harvest. Let those plants grow back. Mulch them in the fall. And this should keep the bed fruiting happily for three, five, six, seven years. Who knows? It really depends on the quality of your soil and how good of a plant manager you are. The final thing you should do, remember what time of year it is. It's summertime. It's hot. It's dry. Water those plants in. After you you've taken all these steps, make sure that you irrigate these plants and keep them nice and wet because you've just beat up the root system quite a bit. All right. And then, keep the weeds out for the rest of the summer. Get ready to mulch for the fall, and you'll have a happy, healthy planting for next year. [music outro] Transcription by CastingWords�