Getting Strawberry Plants Ready for Winter

[music] David Handley: ÊI'm David Handley with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. Today we're going to talk about getting your strawberry plants ready for wintertime. Now strawberries, even though they're grown this far north, are actually not that hardy. The reason they survive up here is because they're very low growing and they're usually covered up with snow for the wintertime. Snow is actually a pretty good mulch. It keeps those plants right at about freezing, even though the air temperature may be considerably colder than that. But, as we know, snow is not very dependable so we always hedge our bets by covering them up with something just in case the snow isn't here when the cold temperatures arrive. The material of choice would be straw. When I'm talking about straw, I'm talking about nice, clean straw. This can be rye straw, oat straw, barley straw, wheat straw. It doesn't really matter. But what you want to avoid is mulch hay. Mulch hay is loaded with weed seeds and when you put that mulch on you're also shaking thousands of weed seeds. They're going to give you problems next year. Here we are putting our straw on. As you do this you just want to get your bale and shake it loosely over the top so that you're covering all those plants. Get a little bit down on the side so the wind doesn't pick it up and blow it away. You want to make sure that that layer is a good six inches thick. 6 to 10 inches is usually what I'm figuring to get that mulch on. I really like to do this either on a rainy day or a day when it's just about to rain because that water will help mat this down and keep the wind from blowing it away onto your neighbor's property the next time it comes up. There are other materials that are suitable if you don't have ready access to straw. We can use things simply like pine needles. Pine needles do a fine job. The reason they're not used on a large scale is because there's just not enough of them to supply us for them. But on a home garden scale, if you have a nice supply of pine needles, just cover the plants up with that, as you'll see, and they'll do a good job. Wood shavings or sawdust can also be used as a good mulch. Bear in mind that as these are broken down in the springtime by the soil bacteria that it robs the soil of nitrogen. So if you're going to use these as a mulch I recommend that you put a little extra fertilizer on them next summer when you're renovating the bed just to make up for the fact that this can tap the soil nitrogen out. Now the time of year to do this... Here in Maine, we're usually looking at putting our mulch on sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It really depends on how cold it gets and just when those plants go dormant. The good news is that strawberries are pretty good about telling you when they're dormant. What we look for is for the red to start showing up on the leaves. You'll actually start to see these leaves starting to collapse down around the crown as you see here. This is an indication that these plants are now going dormant and they're ready for their mulch. You don't want to put the mulch on too early. If you go on too early when these leaves are still up and nice and lush and green, you're covering up those plants and smothering them at a time when they would normally be forming flower buds. You'll actually greatly reduce your yields for next year. So wait until they're dormant, but you want to get that mulch on before the ground freezes hard or you start getting temperatures approaching those single digits because those are the types of temperatures that can actually hurt the strawberry plants. There is another approach you can take. There are some synthetic materials you can put over strawberries. Things like spunbonded row covers. You can see that we've got one of these light fabric row covers on here. These are typically designed to give you a greenhouse effect and actually increase the temperatures under these covers so the plants will grow faster. But they can be used as winter protection if you get one that's heavy enough. You want to get one that... They're rated by the ounce. You typically want to get one that's over one ounce for winter protection. You can put these on at the same time. You'll notice that your plants start to grow a little bit earlier under these than they would under your regular mulch because there is a little bit of a greenhouse effect under there. Keep an eye on this. As soon as you see flowers under there this cover has to come off and you need to protect for frost, because remember, when these air temperatures get down to below freezing you're going to hurt your flower buds. That can happen under these covers. The other thing I don't like about these covers is that when we pull this mulch off in the spring we kind of put it between the rows to keep our fruit nice and dry. The covers don't really offer that so you may want to have some mulch handy to spread down in the spring after you take these covers off to give the fruit a nice dry place to develop on so it won't get muddy and your feet won't get muddy when you're out there picking the fruit. [music]