Growing strawberries

Growing Strawberries

Strawberries are a great, low maintenance perennial. Not only will they give you a crop of delicious, sweet fruit every year, they'll also provide you with new, free plants too.

Strawberries spread by putting out runners and cloning themselves. These baby plants are clones of the mother plant, so will bear the same fruits. Most plants put out a few runners at a time, so you can get a lot of new plants every year.

Using the Runners to Clone Your Strawberry Plants

The easiest way to propagate strawberry plants is to put the baby plants into small pots of garden soil, but leaving them attached to the mother plant until they take root. Hold them in place using a bit of bendy wire or a twig, and then once they've taken root, you can snip them off the mother plant.

If a runner has multiple plants on it, snip off the ones nearest the end, so that the plant will focus all of its energy on the one plant.