Strawberry Patch Management in June (Birds Eat Everything)
I walked out to my strawberry patch on a Tuesday morning in early June, and I want to say it was raining a little, because this is Redmond and it is always raining a little. Every single berry that had been just about ready the day before was gone. Not knocked over, not half-eaten. Gone. I’m not even mad at the birds. Honestly, that’s impressive coordination.
Anyway. Strawberry patch management in June is basically a two-front war: keeping the birds out and figuring out whether your plants should be fruiting right now or putting out runners. Let’s do this in order.
Keeping Birds Out Without Spending Much
The cheapest thing that actually works is bird netting over a simple frame. You bend cheap half-inch PVC pipe into low hoops, push the ends into the soil on either side of the bed, drape the netting over the top. The whole setup for a 4×8 bed runs maybe a few dollars in PVC plus whatever netting costs at McLendon Hardware, which I think I paid around $11.40 for a roll last spring that I’m still using. It goes a long way.
The netting does need to be tight to the ground or birds will just walk under it. I know this because the birds in my yard have apparently figured out doors.
If you want something even lazier, reflective tape strung across the patch does deter birds. Birds have four types of cone cells in their eyes compared to our three, so ultraviolet-reflecting surfaces genuinely freak them out a little. String the tape, watch it spin in the wind, feel vaguely smug. Not 100% reliable but basically free if you already have the tape sitting in a drawer somewhere.
Then there’s the fake snake option. I will not apologize for recommending this. A rubber snake from the dollar bin at Sky Nursery, flopped casually into the strawberry bed, absolutely works for a few days until the birds figure out it hasn’t moved. The key is moving it every couple of days. My daughters think this is the greatest thing we’ve ever planted. They’re not wrong.
Runners: Keep Them or Cut Them?
This is where strawberry patch management gets a little philosophical. Strawberry plants send out runners, which are long horizontal stems that eventually root and become new plants. The plant is doing two things at once: trying to fruit and trying to clone itself. If you let it do both, it usually does neither especially well.
When a plant sends out a runner, it’s diverting carbohydrates away from the crown and developing fruit. One sentence of biology: the runner tip produces auxin, which actively suppresses lateral branching and fruit bud development at the mother plant. Which is a fancy way of saying your berries get smaller and your patch gets messier at the same time. A real lose-lose situation, except for the runner.
In June during active harvest, I pinch runners off. Scissors, fingernails, whatever’s in my hand. If I want to expand the patch I’ll let a few runners root in late summer after fruiting slows down, then cut the connecting stem and transplant the new plant. Free plants. Which, now that I think about it, is really what cheap vegetable gardening is about at the cellular level.
June-Bearers vs Everbearers vs Day-Neutrals
This one trips people up and I get why. If your strawberry patch is going crazy right now in June, you almost certainly have June-bearing varieties. They bloom once, triggered by shorter day lengths in spring, and dump basically all their fruit in a two to three week window. Feast or famine. You get a ton of berries, then nothing until next year.
Everbearers are a little misleading by name. They typically give you two flushes, one in June and a smaller one in late summer or early fall. Not a continuous harvest, more like two waves. Better than one, but don’t expect a berry a day all season.
Day-neutrals are the ones that actually fruit continuously, because they don’t care about day length, they just fruit whenever temperatures are in the right range (roughly 35-85°F). Albion and Seascape are common day-neutral varieties if you’re shopping around. Here in the PNW, day-neutrals often outperform in our long, mild summers. The berries tend to be smaller but you get them steadily from June through September, which honestly works better for our family than trying to make jam out of eleven pounds of Hoods in one week.
Not that I’ve done that. Okay I’ve done that. The jam was fine but I was up until midnight and I had work the next morning and I still resent it a little.
The Short Version
Put netting up now, before the birds take another Tuesday from you. Pinch runners while your plants are actively fruiting. And if your patch is done in two weeks and you’re staring at bare plants wondering what happened, that’s a June-bearer, and it’s working exactly as advertised. Plant a few day-neutrals next to it next year and you’ll be in berries all summer.
I’m going to go move my fake snake now. For the plants, obviously. Totally for the plants.
Photo by Elmer Cañas on Unsplash
