Out with the old, in with the new…

Useful words

Crown: the very centre of the plant. The bigger and well formed the crown, the more flowers therefore the more strawberries.

Before removing the dead leaves, our plants may have looked… dead. That isn’t a very nice word to describe our strawberries so let’s go with ‘not as alive as you would hope’. But now that we’ve removed the dead leaves, a set of new leaves have been revealed. *magic*

The old leaves are kept on the plant over December and January to protect the crown from frost. Removing the dead leaves now will make sure the plants use their energy solely for new growth – rather than maintaining older leaves.

Our photos explain this a bit simpler. You can clearly see the plants now have several crowns. The ideal plant will have two large and healthy crowns which will produce good sized berries.

Multiple, small crowns

If a plant has several crowns like the photo on the above, the berries will be smaller.

The photo below shows the ideal amount of crowns…

It takes 6 weeks for strawberries to grow from a flower. We are hoping to have our first harvest in mid-April so should be seeing some flowers at the beginning of March!