Waking Up Your Strawberry Bed in Early Spring
I went out to check my strawberry bed last week and it looked like something had given up on life. Brown mush, dead runners everywhere, a few leaves that were technically still green but seemed embarrassed about it. Every March it looks like this, and every March I forget that this is just what strawberries look like in February and they’re probably fine.
They’re almost always fine.
If you threw some straw over your beds in November, now is the time to start peeling it back. Not all at once. The ground here in the Pacific Northwest is still doing that thing where it freezes overnight and then it’s 52 degrees and sunny by noon, and your strawberries don’t love wild temperature swings any more than you do. Pull the straw back gradually over a week or so, or just rake it to the edges of the bed so it can pull double duty as a weed barrier later. Free mulch is free mulch.
The Actual Cleanup Part
Grab your scissors or a cheap pair of garden snips and start removing the dead and brown foliage. Cut at the base, not partway up. Leaving stubs is how you invite rot, and we’ve already got plenty of rot happening in a Redmond garden in March without sending out more invitations.
The runners you didn’t deal with in fall are next. Anything that rooted where you didn’t want it, anything growing over the edge of the bed, anything that looks like it spent six months just wandering around with no particular plan. Cut them. Strawberries put a lot of energy into runners that could go into fruit instead, which is kind of the whole point of being out here.
While you’re in there, thin the crowns if the bed is looking crowded. About 12 inches between plants is a good rule of thumb. I know that sounds ruthless when you’re staring at something you’ve been growing for two years, but crowded beds get disease problems and produce smaller fruit. I learned this the hard way in year one when I let every single runner root and ended up with a dense mat of strawberry plants and approximately four berries. Not my finest hour.
What the Bed Actually Needs Right Now
Strawberries are heavy feeders once they start waking up, but March is not the moment to pile on fertilizer. Wait until you see new green growth pushing out of the crowns, then hit them with a balanced fertilizer or some compost worked in around the base. Not on the crowns. Around them.
If you want to go the cheap route (and you know I do), a couple inches of finished compost scratched in around the plants does most of what a bag of strawberry fertilizer does, for a lot less. I keep a compost bin going year-round for exactly this moment.
Once real growth kicks in, a light application of balanced granular fertilizer around late March or early April is plenty. Don’t overdo the nitrogen or you’ll get gorgeous lush leaves and sad little fruit. I did this once. Lots of green. Zero berries worth mentioning. My daughters were not impressed. Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty good way to describe that whole season.
A Few Things to Actually Look At
Check the crowns. They should sit at or just slightly above soil level. If winter heaving pushed them up, press them back down gently. If they’ve sunk below the soil, mound a little dirt away from the crown so it isn’t buried. Buried crowns rot. This one is easy to miss and annoying to deal with after the fact.
Look for gray mold on any foliage you’re pulling out. Fluffy, gray, shows up on leaves that spent the whole winter wet and smothered. The fix is removing the affected material and improving airflow, which is mostly just doing the cleanup described above. So. Good timing.
Slugs are already out here in Redmond. Probably have been since February. If you see ragged holes in any of the new leaves starting to come up, that’s your culprit. A ring of diatomaceous earth around the bed or some iron phosphate bait handles it without wrecking your soil biology.
The Part Where It Pays Off
June-bearing strawberries are about three months out from fruit here in zone 8b. Everbearing types will start showing up a little sooner. Either way, what you do in March determines a lot of what June looks like.
An hour of cleanup now, maybe two, and your bed goes from “did everything die” to actively growing and ready to flower. I’ve skipped this step before. The berries still showed up, but fewer, smaller, and the bed looked rough all season. The strawberries were clearly bitter about it. (Pun unintended. Mostly.)
Clean it up, give it some compost, get out of its way. That’s genuinely the whole plan.
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
