Growing Strawberries (Part 2): Pruning, Pests, and Harvesting

Strawberries are one of the most fun and easy crops to grow for some of the most delicious fruit ever. So in this video I'm going to take you through exactly how to care for your strawberries as they're growing. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. In part one of our strawberry grow guide, if you haven't seen it, please go check that out first. We talked about how to plant them. So the bare root strawberries, do you go with potted, do you do June bearing, every bearing, all that kind of stuff. So the exact planting, soil, all that. Today, what we're going to do is dive into how to care for them, how to make sure that you maximize the growth of your strawberries. And there's some sort of counterintuitive stuff that you probably should do to your strawberries to make sure you get a good yield. So cultivate that Like button and I will personally bless you with 70% sweeter berries and twice as plump. And let's get into the video. So these strawberries, the ever bearing ones, Albion and Seascape that I planted, have really blown up. The growth has been incredible, but there's a couple of weird things that I did to make sure that happens. So why don't we take a closer look at one of these berries? So take a look at this guy right here. Beautiful, beautiful leaves. A nice dark green, very minimal issues. I mean maybe a kind of a funky leaf right here. But what don't you see on this strawberry? I'll give you a second, maybe drop it in the comments. You don't see any flowers at all. Take a look. I've chopped off the flowers right there. I've chopped off the flowers over here and it just doesn't make sense. Why would I come through and chop off all the flowers? We'll take a look at this clip from Instagram to know why. It's time to murder some strawberry flowers. I just put in the strawberry bed. They're ever bearing strawberries. That means they'll fruit maybe two, three times a year. And these little flowers are what becomes the strawberry. So why am I chopping them off? It's because I need more of these leaves. For ever bearing strawberries, you want to take off all of the flowers until about July. That lets the plant focus on producing leaves. So it's time to say goodbye. I know it probably hurts to see, but in my opinion, it is a smart idea to do this. Now, a couple of caveats. If you're growing ever bearing strawberries, I recommend snipping off all the flowers through June. As soon as July comes around, let them go and you don't have to worry about pruning the flowers off anymore. Cause you're going to get at least two flushes, if not three of berries still after that point. But by taking all of the flowers off, you're going to let it blow up with leafy growth, which gives it more energy to get even more fruit down the road. If you're growing a June bearing, obviously you wouldn't want to prune the flowers off through June because then you'd get no strawberries at all. So you want to do it for the first couple months after you plant in. And then after that, maybe in May, let them run. And speaking of running, that's the next thing we're going to talk about. So what do you see here? We've got this main strawberry plant. This is one of the ones I planted in part one of the video, looking really nice. But look, there's sort of a little alien running out this way and bopping right there. And then coming and bouncing in right here. It looks like a whole new strawberry plant. And it actually is. Cause take a look. If I pull this up just a little bit, you can actually see roots start to develop. This is what's called a strawberry runner. So strawberry runners are just one of the ways that strawberries try to propagate themselves, make more of themselves. But if they're doing that, what might they not be doing? They might not be putting out more leaves. They might not be putting out some beautiful juicy berries. And so a lot of people will say, take the runners off. Certainly I would say take all the runners off, in my opinion, except for maybe one. The only reason why I'm leaving one on these is because you can see there's a little bit of gap between all these berries. And I do want this to be a nice lush bed full of berries. So what I've opted to do is cut off every single strawberry runner I see, except for one per plant. And then no more ever. Because at that point, there'll just be too many strawberry plants in here. And I'll have my goal of filling it all the way up. So what you want to do is just come in and I can see one right here. We'll clip it right off. And that's it. So this plant has one runner still, right? So it's got this one right here. Hasn't quite rooted up yet. What you'll notice is roots will start to develop on the bottom of this node here. You can make it go a little bit faster by moving the mulch away and pressing it down in and just covering it slightly so it has soil adherence. But if you were going to cut one off, like for example, take a look at this one. This one has a runner node right here, but it's running again. We don't want it to run again. We only want one of them. So I'm going to take that off right there. If this plant only has one runner, then I'm going to let this one go. If I have to go over here and cut another one off, then I'll do that. Another thing I'm noticing in my strawberry bed that I could do while they're sizing up is shore up my mulch. You know, I put some straw mulch on at the start. It might've been a little bit light and you can see some patchiness here. Well, these are just areas that it's going to be drying out way quicker. Strawberries want a little bit of mulch around them. So let's go ahead and shore this up with some more straw. So before I put the straw on, it's a good time to fertilize. It's been about, I would say about two months since I planted these in. So I'm just going to sprinkle some Espoma Berry Tone right over the top and not be too precious about it. Just take a few handfuls, go ahead and spread it around. We'll get it closer towards the base if we can. Nice organic granular fertilizer. It's got what berries need, hence the name Berry Tone. Espoma is the sponsor of the video. They're a longtime partner of Epic Gardening. We love their stuff. Absolutely love it. Family owned company. So we're going to go in, sprinkle it around. This way you get to passively fertilize. You don't really have to worry about it too much cause you cover it with the mulch. Helps that break down a little bit more. And yeah, I know I'm sprinkling it on the plants. Not a huge deal. Okay, let's go ahead and get the mulch on now. The mulch that I'm using is a shredded straw mulch called Garden Straw, but really just use whatever mulch you have locally available to you that you can get. I like this cause in my climate, the hot weather really helps. It really helps to reflect the heat off the hot weather, which we're getting quite a bit of here in San Diego. Don't get a lot of rain, get a decent amount of heat. Even a coastal breeze can't really save me. So this is what I'm doing. But you just want to come in, shore it up with a little bit more mulch. Make sure you protect it as you move into the summer where the production of the berries really starts to ramp up. Okay, we have mulched it up. We've fertilized it. We've pruned off any extra flowers and runners that we see in this middle phase of growth. We've kept some of the runners that we want. I'm just washing this off because I want to make sure that I don't let straw or any fertilizer sit on top of the leaves. It's been a few weeks since we last talked here in the strawberry bed. A lot has gone on. So I'm going to go over just a couple pest issues that we battled and what we did to try to remedy those. But these strawberries actually got beat up for I would say two or three weeks before they really started to kick back. And of course we do have some fruit, so we'll do some harvesting. We'll talk about propagation of runners as well. So on this leaf you can see an example of the type of damage that we were dealing with. It seems like something was coming through and munching just the actual leaf tissue. They would leave the veins and they would leave the main stem. So they'd sort of skeletonize the leaves. So this is the main pest we dealt with. What seemed to happen, number one, were earwigs. Earwigs seem to be a problem across the country right now. I'm getting a lot of gardeners telling me on Instagram and other channels that they're just battling earwigs like crazy. So I think at night earwigs were coming out and doing a little bit of munching. But I also did see some either armyworms or cutworms. Cutworms are called that because what they'll do is they'll come, let me take a little runner off here, they'll come and literally just eat around the stem to the point where it's so weak that it cuts it off. So it'll just do that. And you'll come out and you'll see your plants just completely chopped off at the knees. So we've done a couple different things to try to prevent that that I'll show you right now. Earwig trap number one I'm setting up is going to be an olive oil and, oh, that's not enough olive oil. I need to go get more. Olive oil and soy sauce trap. So there's the oil. That's so that they can't get out once they get in. Soy sauce is the attractant. I'll add a little more oil here. This next one is the potato hut trap that I got from my friend, Jessica Wallace. Cut it in half, scoop it out a little bit. With this one, the idea is you provide a little shelter that they'll start to go under and eat and decompose. This is more for the pill bugs or the roly polies. And then you can just grab this and toss them in the trash or in the oil. The final trap for today requires us to grab an ice cold, refreshing beer. So I'm going to get the Celebration from Sierra, my favorite brewery. And let's go outside. Most of this will be drank, but the idea is simple. You just pour the beer. This is like a time honored one, mostly for slugs and snails. Pour the beer in. The yeast content within is what attracts them. And you want to do it at the bed level or below so that it's easy for them to fall in. I'll let the foam settle a little bit. Bad pour, if you will. And then we'll, we'll fill it up just a little bit more. But this is great for slugs and snails. Out of those DIY traps that I mentioned, the most effective was probably the soy sauce and oil trap. Generally speaking, that's the one that gets the most earwigs. The potato one that I just showed you probably gets the most pill bugs. And then the beer trap tends to get the most slugs or snails. I don't really think we had a lot of slugs or snails. Not a huge pest for us here, at least in my zone in Tenby and San Diego. But if you do want a foolproof solution, there's a product, it's organic, it's called Sluggo Plus. That's the one that seems to have pretty good effect across all three of those pests in a strawberry bed or otherwise. So I would look at that. But now let's actually look at the results of pruning off our flowers and pruning off our runners for so long to boost strawberry production. So here is just one of the strawberry plants that we planted earlier in the season. And as you can see, it's doing really well. All this new growth is nice and healthy. This one also got decimated by the pests, but it's bounced back quite well. And take a look. I mean, these flower clusters are putting out a lot of fruit. A couple of these are ready to harvest. This one here, this little guy here. And they can just support way more fruit because of all these leaves that are now here that wouldn't have been here if we didn't take off these flower clusters and some of these runners early on. By the way, if you are really sad about taking off runners, you can just take a little pot of soil like this and pick your runner. So here's a spot where it might root. You could also put it down in here. This is a little bit young. And you could just pin it down just like this until it roots. And then what you would do is cut behind it. So removing the umbilical cord and you'd have a new strawberry in a pot that you could then transplant wherever you wanted. So when you take these runners off, don't be too sad because you can do something with them if you want to. Now it's time to do what we've actually all been waiting for, which is harvest these strawberries. I have quite a few. I'm curious to see how many I get, but I've got my little snips. Let's just start to harvest. While I'm doing this, by the way, I'll still be cleaning up runners and any sort of dead or diseased or damaged plant matter that I can just cause why not make the most of this harvesting sesh. So some of these have rotted out, whether it be overripe or just a pest got to them or something weird happened. So for these, I'm just going to toss in my compost heaps. I'll set them aside for now. So that's not a bad little first harvest for our strawberries this season. And we have to remember that we're just beginning. It's the end of June. These are everbearing strawberries. They're going to keep producing throughout the season. So I'm going to get at least two more much larger crops off than what I just got. But we need to taste test this right now. All right, let's take the biggest juiciest boy. I actually don't know if this is Albion or Seascape, one of the two varieties I planted just by looking at it, but I guess we'll see. So, so sweet. And when you harvest it right from the garden, it's got that little bit of sort of field warmth to it that just makes it, makes you know you grew it yourself. It's a little bit nice and warm. So good. I have about 25 in here. They're probably not going to make it inside. So that is how to grow strawberries. There's a lot more on how to care for these plants after the season is done because even everbearing are going to last only maybe two or three years or so before you'd want to refresh. But remember, I just gave you that tip on propagating from runners. So you can just totally do that. Some pests, some disease issues, but we covered a decent amount of that in today's guide. So if you have any other comments, I will for sure do other strawberry videos in the future. Let me know down in the comments. But for now, I got some snacks to eat right now. I'll see you guys soon. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.