Strawberries

Hi y'all,

I found some information on strawberries at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberries. One of the items that sticks out is the fact that you can control the "output" (strawberries or plant runners) by either letting the runners grow, yielding more plants ,or removing the runners and getting more strawberries.

In the garden, 2 of the 3 beds are pretty well stocked with plants while the remaining bed has plenty of room for new ones. Question??? Do we want to start removing the runners from the beds that are saturated with plants and get more fruit? The plants will also also grow taller, suspending the fruit in the air rather than having them lying on the ground.

While picking strawberries, I've noticed that quite a few of the ripe ones that end up lying on the ground suffer from slug molestation. I think the slugs are quite prevalent right now because of the wet conditions.

***John, if you saw a couple of small piles of ripe strawberries in the garden this morning, these were removed by me Sunday morning. They were either overripe and rotting, or have been damaged by slugs or some other pest.***


Observations/Actions:

1) Many of the plants are bearing 3 to 6 very small fruit and several of these fruit are just lying on the ground white as a British tourist. These small fruit, even when they do mature are not very tasty. I've been removing these from the plant to let it focus on new fruit that we can harvest.

2) The taller plants are beginning to yield fruit that is hanging rather than lying on the ground. This will make it a bit harder for the slugs to get at them.