Strawberry Patch

Hi, I'm Christy Wilhelmi with Gardenerd and today I'm going to show you how to clean up a strawberry patch. Strawberries are pretty much low maintenance, but every once in a while they need a facelift, let's just say. So what happens here is you'll end up with a lot of new growth and some of the old growth will die away. So if you go in here, you're going to see a lot of dead stuff and, The reason why we remove dead material rather than leaving it there as a mulch is because it encourages sow bugs and pill bugs because pill bugs love to eat decaying matter and what is mulch if not decaying matter. So that's all got to come out. And you can compost it and reapply it later as compost. So it doesn't go to waste. So when you pull out your disease and kind of moldy strawberries and things So then what you want to do is put down a layer of compost, I shake it over the top of the strawberries and then sort of shake the plants and it all drops down. Not so deep that you want to end up covering the crowns and we'll talk about that some in another video, but you'll end up fertilizing your plants at the same time. Now there are two schools of thought around daughters and those are the little critters that form new strawberries off of a trail. And some people say to cut them off because it decreases the energy and the plant, it decreases the energy and ability for the main plants to grow. Others So then every other year what I do for healthy strawberries, I actually lift all of the plants out. So I'll clean out all the dead stuff and I'll lift the plants out and set them in a container in the shade. I'll add a couple inches of compost or new soil and then I'll replant the strawberries and that revitalizes them for another couple of years. So you never have to throw away or pull and replant your new plants ever. You just keep harvesting from your existing plants for years and years. So that's how to clean up strawberry bed and I'm Kristie Wilhelmi of Gardenerd.