I am doing something new! Something I have never done before! I am hoping it works because if it does it will save me HUNDREDS of dollars, and who doesn’t enjoy saving money? I am going to attempt to start new strawberry plants from runners off of my established ‘mother’ plants. Everything I have read about starting strawberry plants from runners makes it sound like it is the easiest thing around. They make it sound full-proof, that you can’t mess it up. Montey Don on Gardeners World showed that all you have to do to start new plants is lay the runner on top of a pot filled with dirt. Pin it down. Then in a week or two you can go back, cut the runner off and you will have a new plant. Sounds easy, right? Well, we will see.
You should be doing this in mid to late summer. But it is now fall and I want to try to get some new plants going before winter so hopefully I don’t have to spend a wad of money at the beginning of the year buying new plants to expand my crop. I am going to give it a try and see what happens. It honestly can’t hurt anything.
My strawberry beds were in desperate need of weeding so as I cleaned them out I cut the runners off the mother plant. I could not believe how many runners were on these plants! There were hundreds of new plants growing off the original plants. Huge long runners that sometimes had three or four new plants growing on them. I was so surprised! I knew that strawberry plants grew runners but I didn’t know how easily they grew them. I mean these runner plants were growing on top of my black plastic I had down to suppress weeds. They weren’t even growing on dirt! It was crazy!
Anyways, I cut off as many runners as I could. Beside me I had four 2.5 gallon plastic freezer bags with wet paper towels at the bottom of the bags. I had the towels pretty wet, barley squeezing out any of the water. As I cut the runners off I stuffed them into the bags. I literally filled up the bags as much as I could. Once the bag was full, I zipped up the bag leaving about an inch or two open to allow air into the bag. It took me the rest of the day and the whole next day to finish cleaning up my strawberries and getting them ready for the winter. Therefore my strawberry cuttings sat in those bags for about three days before I got around to planting them. When I came back to the bags I assumed I would see some of the leaves wilting and browning. I was pleasantly surprised to see that all the runners still looked amazing! They looked like I had just cut them a couple hours before.
I started by cutting the runners into individual plants. I took my clippers and cut the runner as close to the new plant as possible. I then filled up a pot full of soil and a little garden tone (I have the pots and garden tone I used linked below if you are curious about that), made a small hole with my finger, and planted my baby strawberry plant. When I planted my strawberry plants I made sure not to plant them too deep or too shallow. Just like with full grown plants you don’t want the crowns too deep so they rot, or too shallow so they freeze. Since these are baby plants and their crowns are SO small it literally looks like you are just setting the plants on the top of the soil (remember how I said Montey does his starts?) I just kept repeating this process until I had all the runners cut up and planted. In the end I ended up with about 300 plants planted up. To save on soil I switched from using the 4 inch pots that took a bunch of soil and went to using seed starting trays (I will link them below if you want to see the ones I used).
I am going to keep these baby plants in our greenhouse for the winter. I did not mark any of my new strawberry plants (mainly because I forgot to do that) but I do know that the cuttings I took are from both Honeoye and Sparkle strawberries. Both of these varieties are cold tolerant but since they are such small plants I wanted to give them some shelter during this winter so they weren’t too stressed.
I am really hoping that these plants will survive the winter and grow to be just as big and beautiful as their parent plants! It is truly an easy process and if I can get the plants to survive I will be saving myself HUNDREDS of dollars in the future! And I love saving money! 🙂