Tidying-up the Strawberries

My Strawberry plants were being slowly but inexorably submerged in fallen Maple leaves. I judged it the right moment to give them their annual tidy-up.

The shingle round the Strawberry containers was criss-crossed with runners, many of them firmly rooted in the soil below. It almost seemed a shame to rip them up.

The Strawberry is a very vigorous self-propagator, and each plant will produce loads of runners, making a new plant every foot or so.

Each of these is a ready-made clone of its parent. Getting new Strawberry plants is a simple as snipping off the runner, trimming it...

...and potting it up (seen here in a 3" pot).

The tidy-up didn't take long: a few snips with the secateurs and this is what was left:

Now I know it is good practice to renew Strawberry plants every few year, because they do gradually lose their vigour, so I decided that it would be appropriate to establish a routine for this. I removed and discarded the oldest plants and replaced them with four of the best runners, adding a bit of new compost to get them off to a good start. I was able to identify the oldest plants because they still had the original plant-labels in the soil next to them. [Top left in photo above.] Now for the really organised part: I gave each of the four containers a reference number, indicated by a different-coloured and numbered label...

And each container will now be replaced in rotation, every fourth year!

Here we see the containers sporting the new labels:

Simples!