Paint the garden red with strawberry runners

There’s little better than eating lush, sweet strawberries plucked straight from your own plants.

Juicy details: Growing your own strawberries from runner plants is both easy and inexpensive. Picture: Ryan Cantwell

THERE’S little better than eating lush, sweet strawberries plucked straight from your own plants.

It’s surely one of life’s great pleasures.

Yet sometimes that privilege gets a little pricey.

I don’t want to sound a Scrooge but a few years back I set up a strawberry patch and was shocked at the cost. Usually I buy strawberry runners but there are none about, so I was forced to buy small potted strawberry plants at $4.50 each.

I figured a dozen plants would give the family a few decent feeds.

It might not sound a lot but multiplied by 12, my strawberry plants cost on the wrong side of $50.

I figured I could get quite a few punnets of store-bought strawbs for that.

Certainly back then I got lots of fresh berries from my planting, but I vowed never to buy plants that way in the future.

I don’t begrudge nurseries charging that much. Potted strawberries are cheap considering they must be bought in, before even considering the initial cost of pots, potting mix and time spent nurturing plants.

Yet you, the gardener, can make hefty savings by using strawberry runners.

That’s why I have used runners to establish my latest strawberry patch.

Rather than $50-plus, I paid just $8.99 for 10 healthy, bare-root Red Gauntlet runners, or about 90 cents each, from a garden centre. What a bargain, particularly in light of potted strawberries I noticed being sold in another large chain for $6.85 each.

My runners came wrapped and bound in wet newspaper, ready to go straight into the ground.

If you’ve never grown strawberries from runners, it’s easy.

Runners are the multiple growths that appear from mature plants, each one working its way outward to root and produce offspring.

Generally these are best snipped off so as not to rob the parent plant of energy. Yet after a couple of years you can make the growing process even cheaper by allowing some healthy, disease-free runners to grow, creating new plants.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

Now is the ideal time to get your strawberries in the ground and away.

They need good drainage so are best planted in raised beds of well manured soil in a spot that gets good sun.

A handful of blood and bone won’t go astray either.

Dig beds to 20-30cm before hilling up soil lengthwise.

Cut away dead or dying leaves on your runners and rinse roots in water before reducing them to about 10cm long.

Plantings can be made into either side of the hill, with plants about 30cm apart in rows 80-100cm apart.

Water in well and mulch with decomposed pine needles or straw (that’s where the word strawberry comes from), or follow the commercial growers’ example by using black plastic sheeting.

If using black plastic, lay it first before cutting slits to allow runners to be dug in, but resist the urge to plant too deeply (keep crowns just above ground level).

Apart from blocking weeds, black plastic retains heat, encouraging earlier cropping.

Water regularly and liquid fertilise every few weeks to encourage steady growth — and don’t forget to net to keep marauding birds and others at bay.

After cropping, cut back plants to ground level.

After three or four years, start with new runners and set up a new patch, to minimise the chances of disease setting in.

Runners can sometimes be hard to find but it’s worth the effort — and your hip pocket will love you.

What to do this week:

PLANT broad beans, cabbage, garlic, lettuce, onion, peas and radish.

PREPARE ground for planting bare-root roses around the shortest day of the year (June 21)

SOW a green manure crop (oats, dun peas, lupins, rye corn) to be dug in to revitalise vegie beds.

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