Master Gardener: Mastering the art of growing strawberries (2024)

Brian Jervis Ask a Master Gardener

Who doesn’t love strawberries? And if you love strawberries, there’s nothing better than strawberries fresh from your garden.

One challenge with strawberries is that the plants are in the ground year-round, but you only get one really good harvest a year. But again, if you are a strawberry fan, that’s not really an issue.

Since the recommended time to plant strawberries is between Feb. 1 and March 15, now would be the time to get your strawberry plants. While we were out buying onion sets and seed potatoes for our Master Gardener farm, we noticed they had strawberry plants available. So now is the time.

One of the things you will notice when shopping for strawberry plants is that strawberry plants break out into two different types of plants. There are June bearing plants and everbearing plants.

June bearing strawberry plants produce the bulk of their berries between May and mid-June. Everbearing strawberries produce a good crop like the June bearing plants but then continue to produce additional strawberries during the summer and then produce additional berries in the fall. If you would like to have a smattering of strawberries at different times during the growing season, then everbearing would be the best for you. But if you want a lot of strawberries at once for canning or turning into homemade strawberry ice cream, then the June bearing varieties would probably be a good choice.

Strawberries are going to perform the best in a location with full sun. You can grow them in shadier locations, but you’ll get more greenery than berries.

Strawberries will do best in soils with a pH of between 6 and 6.5. This is a little lower than we shoot for when growing vegetables, so you will probably need to do some adjusting to your soil pH. A soil test is the best way to determine your soil chemistry, and we have information on our website on how to get a soil test. Just click on Lawn and Garden Help and then Soil.

Strawberries are pretty easy to grow, but they are picky about their planting depth. Because of that, try to plant your strawberry plants so that the roots are just below the surface and are completely covered up. If you plant them too deep, the roots tend to rot, and if planted too shallow, they tend to dry up and die. Paying attention to this detail will help you be a more successful strawberry grower.

Now, here’s the hard part about growing strawberries: Don’t expect to enjoy fruit the first year. For that first year, you should remove the flowers so that the plant will direct its energies toward developing a good root system rather than pushing out fruit. This is difficult for many gardeners, but the first year should be about your strawberry plants getting established.

You’ll also need to do what we call “renovating” your strawberry beds. To renovate a strawberry bed, after the last harvest, you use a lawn mower or weed eater to cut down the plant to about 1 inch of growth. This will help your plant get revitalized to be ready for the next growing season.

Later in the fall, after we have had a couple of hard freezes, you can cover your plants with straw or mulch. Leave this mulch in place until March the following year. Remove the majority of this mulch in the spring when you start to see new growth peeking through. But leave some of the mulch to help give your plants a good growing environment.

We also have strawberry plants available for purchase in our annual Plant Sale Fundraiser. Just visit tulsamastergardeners.org. Good luck.