Want Better Strawberries? It All Starts NOW (Fall)

It's easy to think that strawberries are all about spring planting and summer picking. But if you want bigger, sweeter, more numerous strawberries next season, then the work starts now in fall. So today in this video, I'm going to show you how to care for your strawberry plants in fall so that they'll come back stronger than ever next season. Okay, it really does not look like much now, but these strawberry plants had a great year. I got a ton of fruit off of them, and now they look a mess because they've made it through the summer. Summer here is really hot, and they don't really like that. So they've sort of limped along, and now that the weather's getting milder, even though it looks like a mess, this is the perfect time to reset my strawberry bed and get them ready for next year. So I've got plenty of weeds in here, not as many as there were just a couple weeks ago. I did actually already pull out the worst of the weeds that had kind of choked out the strawberry plants. But there's still a lot of weeds. There's old mulch, plenty of old, sad leaves with some pest damage. They need a reset. So that's what we're going to do today, and the first step is just to clean things out. We want to make sure that pests don't have anywhere to hide. That's the way that this is going to work. And I also want to make sure that the plants themselves aren't too crowded, and this will give me a chance to just sort of see the lay of the land, see what I'm dealing with. So let's start clearing. Okay, I've finished weeding and clearing. You can see behind me it looks a lot better, but now it's time to give these plants a little haircut. The next step is called renovation, and that sounds super serious and scary, but all it means is cutting back the plants. Now, before we get into this, this is super important. This is a step you only need to take for June-bearing strawberries. For the other kinds of strawberries, we have everbearing and day-neutral, which is sort of a variation on everbearing. Do not cut those back the same way, because they fruit over a longer season, and they need a little bit different care. We'll talk about that a little bit more at the end of the video, but most of what I'm going to show you here is for June-bearing strawberries, which is a really common type to grow. A lot of the ones that you know and love are June-bearing, and these are the varieties that produce one major flush of berries in the end of spring to the beginning of summer, depending on where you live. And once they're done fruiting, the plants are really depleted. So this renovation pruning is something that's really important to help them get more vigor, to help them set fruiting buds, which they do in the fall, and be ready to fruit again next spring, once they come out of dormancy and get growing again. Now that I've cleared everything away, I can really see what I'm working with. I can see where the plants are crowded, I can see where I need to trim away old growth. So what I'm going to do is grab my sharp and very sanitized pruning shears. So with my pruning shears, I'm just going to take each plant and cut it about two inches above the crown. You want to leave that room because we don't want to run any risk of damaging the crown of the plant. The crown is that base of the plant where all of the growth is coming out of. So leave about two inches and then cut down all of the leaves on top of that. This looks a little scary, I know, but trust me, this is going to make all the difference. By getting rid of all of the old growth, the plants are going to be reinvigorated and have the energy to push out a bunch of new growth this time of year. And that's a good thing because the stronger and more robust the plants are in the fall before they go dormant, then the stronger and better that they're going to fruit in the spring. You can see on the base of a few of these plants that there actually is new growth starting. And that's okay, that's one of the reasons we're leaving that two inches of clearance, that we don't damage any new growth. Let's talk for a second about when to do this. This is actually super important. Ideally, the overall general advice is to do this about two weeks after the strawberries finish fruiting. And the idea is to renovate, to cut the plants back before they've started pushing out much if any new growth. That's your best window of opportunity. Now, having said that, it's early September. My strawberry plants finish fruiting in like early June because the summer gets really, really hot here. So I did not prune right away. So here's my admittedly maybe unconventional take on this, but I think it's sound. And let me know in the comments if you agree with me. But if you live in a hot climate, as I do, the plants aren't going to grow through the heat of the summer, right? They've just started growing again now that things are starting to get a little bit milder. So I want to avoid stressing out my strawberry plants as much as possible while they're already stressed from heat and drought and everything that they have to deal with over the summer. There's also more pest pressure. It's just a mess. So I leave them as is until this time of year. And now I can cut back, I can get rid of all of that growth. I can get rid of any places that diseases and pests might want to overwinter. And now they're ready to grow again. So all this to say, just take into account your climate, your specific circumstances when you figure out when to do this. So now is the time to thin out any plants that are weak looking, or you can thin them out and replant them to fill in your bed, which is one thing that I'm going to do. And the key is to leave about six inches between each plant. As they send out new growth over the fall, they're also going to be sending out runners and those little baby daughter plants that are going to then root and become whole new strawberry plants. And that's the beautiful thing about growing strawberries is that they're perpetual and they keep on giving and giving and giving. It looks really bare now. I see a lot of soil, but that's a good thing for what we're about to do. This next step is super important. So after we've done all of this work to rejuvenate the strawberry plants, now we have to deal with the soil. And even more than that, we have to feed them. So to do that, first, I'm going to top dress my soil with some compost. I've already put a little bit of my homemade compost in this bed, but I've also got a couple bags of just a really good quality store-bought compost. And I'm just going to top dress just to feed the soil. This is a relatively new bed. My soil is super sandy, so I always need to add organic material to it. Along with the compost, I'm going to add some other amendments to my soil. And so I'm going to start with bone meal, which is going to be a good source of calcium and phosphorus, and then blood meal, which is a good organic source of nitrogen. Nitrogen is super important this time of year for strawberries because we want them to put out a bunch of new, healthy, leafy growth and get really, really strong so that they can fruit a lot next year. So I'm going to amend my soil with blood meal. And then I'm going to follow it up with an organic granular fertilizer. This one's labeled for citrus and fruit. You can find berry-specific fertilizers. This is just what I had. But look specifically at the NPK numbers here. This is 10 to 8. So you want that first number to be higher because you want to have a good amount of nitrogen. And pretty much all plants need more nitrogen than the other even macronutrients of potassium and phosphorus. So 10 to 8 is a really good ratio. Now my soil is pretty sandy. So if you have sandy soil, a really good idea is to split your feeding in half. So go off of the package instructions as far as how much to use for your square footage. And if your soil is really sandy, use half of that dose now and half in maybe about four to six weeks. If that's not an issue for you, or if you have a shorter fall season, go ahead and do all the feeding in one go. The really important thing is to make sure you're done fertilizing, that you do that last feeding at least four or even better six weeks before your first frost. Because the plants are going to grow, but then we need them to harden off gradually this fall and go dormant. And if they're still growing like crazy because they just got a boost of fertilizer, then all of that new growth is going to get damaged by the cold if it's too late in the fall. So feed now, plenty of time before we get to the first frost. Oh, and one more thing. This is another really important thing that I feel quite passionately about. If you haven't done a soil test in a while, now would be a great time to do it. There's a lot of ways to do this. There's some inexpensive soil test kits that you can get at the hardware store or online. They work pretty well. They'll give you a ballpark. But my favorite way to test your soil is to use a mail away soil testing service, something like MySoil. So I've used MySoil before and it's really great because all you do is gather a soil sample, mail it in, and then they mail you specific recommendations for your garden and how to amend the soil to help your plants. So if you haven't done that in a while, do it so that way you know for sure what your soil actually needs and you don't waste your money or your time adding stuff that's not necessary. While I'm adding the fertilizer, let's just recap and then talk about the very last step of fall care for strawberries. So we've cleaned up the bed, weeded, we did our renovation, pruning, cutting back all of the plants, thinned them out, spread them out, and now we've amended the soil. So the last step, although very important, is something I'm actually not going to do yet. And that is mulching. Mulching is key for keeping strawberry plants alive over the winter in most places. So if you live in zone 7 or lower, in other words, colder, then you're going to want to mulch your strawberry plants once the outside temperatures are consistently getting into the upper 20s and 30s. You don't want to mulch too soon because you don't want the plants to rot and you also want to make sure that they harden off correctly before they need to go dormant for the winter. So as a general rule of thumb, wait until after your first frost. I know that sounds strange, but you do want to mulch before any hard freezes begin. If you live in zone 8, like me, that's where I am, you might need to mulch for a little part of the winter. I usually just wait until I see that the temperatures are dropping down into like the 20s. And for me, that doesn't often happen until January. So it takes a while, but eventually I will mulch. And then if you live in zone 9 or higher, you probably don't need to mulch at all. You might even be growing your strawberries as annuals rather than trying to keep them alive year after year. That's a whole other topic. As far as what to mulch with, my favorite thing is pine straw, pine needles. I like it because it doesn't compact. It stays nice and loose. It doesn't break down too quickly. So it doesn't trap a bunch of moisture, but it still does protect the crowns and the roots of the plants. Another really common one is just regular straw. Just make sure you get weed-free straw. This is the one that I use in my garden. I like straw, although beware, it can compact and trap moisture and get a little bit slimy, especially if you get a lot of winter moisture. So pine needles are my mulch of choice. I would avoid using shredded leaves on strawberry plants for all of the above reasons. They get too compacted. They just become kind of a slimy mass eventually, and there's not enough air circulation. So your plants are going to rot and diseases and all of the nasty things. So avoid that. The very last thing I want to mention is that fall is the best time to plant new strawberry plants, especially if they're June-bearing. So if you want to get a really good crop from your new plants, it's best to plant them in fall, give them a chance to establish, and then they're ready to wake up and fruit come spring. If you live somewhere with a longer winter and your spring comes a little later, you can get away with planting June-bearing strawberries in the spring, in the late winter or early spring. You probably won't get as big a crop that first year. So if you can, plant in the fall. Of course, it can be really tricky to find strawberry plants this time of year, which is ironic because every resource you find says that fall is the right time to plant. But what do you do? You don't need to plant in fall for ever-bearing strawberries. That can wait until the spring. I also promised I would talk about fall care for those, and it's pretty simple. This time of year for your ever-bearing strawberry plants, all you really want to do is clean up around the plants. Trim off any dead or damaged growth. We're not cutting the plants all the way back like you saw in this video. You're just trimming off anything that looks troublesome and just getting rid of old debris and old mulch. You can amend the soil or top dress if you want. There's really no need to fertilize this time of year. We're doing that for our June-bearing plants because they need a big boost of growth this time of year. But the ever-bearing plants are growing throughout the season, so you're better off fertilizing all throughout the year. That's it. We did it. Our strawberry plants are ready to get growing in the fall and then go to sleep for winter. So I know that the reward is going to be a great crop of strawberries next spring. It doesn't look like much now. I wish I could show you in a month or so how beautiful and lush and healthy these plants are going to look. You know what? I will. I'll update you on this channel. But in the meantime, I want to get this video out while it's still time to do this task. So let me know in the comments what zone you're in and whether or not you've done your fall strawberry cleanup yet. I'll also link to a post I have on thefruitgrove.com that talks about all the details, all of these steps of exactly how to care for your strawberry plants in the fall. But thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.