Growing strawberries for first time

[Veggieman98]

Hello gardener’s,

So today i decided to study up on my first plant i bought from garden center today which is the strawberry plant.
The plant is decent size and is in a hanging pot. nice and healthy but trying to find out how to maximize fruit production.
So i think i got runners growing (about 4 of them) i was deciding if i should cut them off or leave them? Will that stress them in this current time of growth or leave them?
I got pink flowers growing with yellow buds inside, are those where the strawberries grow from?
And what type of nutrients should i be feeding them? I prefer dry natural amendments over liquid but if i had too which one do i use?
Any help would be appreciated thanks.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

A pink flower and a hanging basket suggest it is a bit of a 'special'. To maximize fruit production with the ordinary, bog standard, strawberry you take all the flowers off in the first year, it means you get more than twice as much the next year. I have no idea if it would work with this. When I moved here and brought strawberries from my old garden I planted more than I would want so I could harvest some in the first year.
If you peg those runners down in some soil they will develop roots quite quickly and you can cut them free of the main plant, you have a choice, more strawberries instantly, or more plants later

The 'normal' strawberry we grow is a hybrid between a south American one that grows in scrub near the sea and a North American one that grows in open woodland and turned up in France in the sixteen hundreds. There are a lot of different wild strawberries and people have been producing all sorts of hybrids recently, did you get a label with a name on it? Some have very different growing and fruiting habits.

 

[Veggieman98]

A pink flower and a hanging basket suggest it is a bit of a 'special'. To maximize fruit production with the ordinary, bog standard, strawberry you take all the flowers off in the first year, it means you get more than twice as much the next year. I have no idea if it would work with this. When I moved here and brought strawberries from my old garden I planted more than I would want so I could harvest some in the first year.
If you peg those runners down in some soil they will develop roots quite quickly and you can cut them free of the main plant, you have a choice, more strawberries instantly, or more plants later

The 'normal' strawberry we grow is a hybrid between a south American one that grows in scrub near the sea and a North American one that grows in open woodland and turned up in France in the sixteen hundreds. There are a lot of different wild strawberries and people have been producing all sorts of hybrids recently, did you get a label with a name on it? Some have very different growing and fruiting habits.

Thank you for the reply. After looking around for a bit on the internet i found some hybrids with pink flowers and some people explain how some of their strawberries come out small but super sweet and some don’t grow at all on theirs. Very unique. But i do have label for this plant.

 

[YumYum]

I didn't pinch off any runners or flowers when I set my strawberry plants last year but mine are Ozark Beauties with white flowers. The variety might make a difference. Earlier in the year I cleaned the bed and gave away 10 times the roots what I planted, so if I had to do it again, I would do the same thing. This year I have all kinds of strawberries showing, some red and some still green but no plants are running yet which I think is about June or July.

This is what I have been going by:

Spring nitrogen applications are not recommended for established plants, but 10-20 lbs/acre of N may be used if the soil is weak.

30 lbs/acre of N for new plantings, or 50-70 lbs/acre of N for established plants in late June / early July during the period of heavy runner development.

30 lbs/acre of N in late August / early September to provide nutrients for newly developing fruit buds in the next year.

If you can measure the size of the bed to be fertilized and what kind of fertilizer you are going to use, I can figure up how much you should use. I just use a 10-10-10 all purpose fertilizer from Walmart. Looks like you bought that at Lowes so they should have something.