Strawberry runners

Hi I have 2 strawberry plants in 1 hanging basket. I purchased them from a market and dont know what type they are. They haven't really produced any fruit (3 small strawberries between the 2 of them) and I don't think they are going to produce anymore as there are no more flowers and 10 runners. I was thinking of potting the runners but should I do this with all 10 or just a couple? Should I cut some off to conserve the plants energy for next year? I'm new to this and thought I had a dud plant until I started googling it and it gave me hope that they are just young plants....

 

Personally I limit runners to two per plant and cut the rest off. If they are young plants you want the energy to be going into roots and crown - not runners and fruit necessarily.

You're going to have difficulty potting runners from a hanging basket so I would suggest that you put the hanging basket on the ground somewhere and pot the runners into three inch pots at the side.

 

Brill thanks for the responses. So what do you think to this idea?....I could pin 2 runners down and cut the rest off and put them in compost and that way i would see how both suggestions above work?

 

I'd take all the runners and grow them on. You have 2 plants now, and 10 runners. Next year you can have 4 plants (the original 2 plus 2 runners as you suggest), or 12 plants (original 2 plus 10 rooted runners).

4 vs 12.

Then next year, assuming say 4 runners off each plant, 6 (your four plus two rooted runners) vs 60 (your 12 plus 4*12 rooted runners).

 

You shouldn't cut the runners off until they have established a little root node at the very least or a small root system. I tried cutting the runners off and potting them a couple of years ago and it didn't work.

The runner is like a little umbilical cord until the daughter plant gets an established root system to sustain itself.

If you want to propagate your strawbs in a big way then I would go with the other suggestions. I only need to get about twenty new plants a year out of forty existing "adult" plants so I don't propagate all of the runners on.

We do our strawbs in rows so I don't let them spread into a big patch.

It depends on your overall strategy if you have one

 

Go for the 10 runners (5 per plant) per annum, rather than only 2 per plant p.a., otherwise in 10 years you would only have just over 354 thousand plants, rather than over 725 million plants if you saved them all.

 

That's brilliant. I've actually just realised that I've over counted and only have 8 runners so that will bring me a couple of million short

 

After doing those calculations I now regret selling about 1,000 potted up strawberry runners last year @ 3 for £1. If only I'd waited 5 years I could have been a millionaire, rather than just taking a miserable few hundred quid.

 

I know looking at those calculations I'm going to need a few fields instead of a few hanging baskets! Am looking forward to growing lots of nice strawberries though

 

I have a wild strawberry plant outside, which I've nurtured ever since I pinched a runner from, er, the wild.

Its thriving and has produced loads of runners, but no fruit this year.

The other day I found a load of wild strawberries with loads of fruit on. The lad and I munched loads of them and they were far more delicious than cultivated ones, so I'm going to release my container-bound wild strawberry plant into open ground in my garden. I have a patch that I deliberately keep wild looking, so I'll let it go there. hopefully next year I'll have a gazillion.

 

Hopefully next year will be your year. I must look out for wild strawberries then as the ones you found sound yummy

 

I have a mixture of alpine, large strawbs and pineberries and I always root the runners. It has never occurred to me to do otherwise. Is there something I should know?

 

Well don't ask me because I haven't a clue (although I've learnt a lot in the past few months but still need to ask many questions from people who have tried and tested everything). One thing I was wondering though is do the runners appear only after the plant has finished fruiting as I have another plant that has produced 1 runner but still has flowers which are in the beginning process of forming strawberries? Is the runner going to take away energy from the plant fruiting and signal the end of strawberry production for this year?