Growing strawberry plants is one of my favorite gardening adventures. Once they get growing, strawberry plants produce abundant strawberry fruit. Outwit the birds, and you’ve got your own personal fruit supply for several weeks, or you can make a strawberry jam recipe that tastes like a burst of summer.

strawberry hanging over the edge of a raised bed

Growing Strawberry Plants

To grow healthy strawberry plants that produce abundant strawberry fruits, you’ll need to understand the plants and their life cycles. As with all plants, once you understand a little about how they grow, you’ll understand what they need in order to thrive. Happy, healthy strawberry plants produce abundant fruit – which is great for you and for your garden.

Plant Profile: Strawberries

Full sunlight: 8 hours a day or more
Rich, well drained soil with a pH of 5.8 – 6.2
Plenty of compost in the soil
Likes slightly moist soil, so be prepared to water them
Mulch in late fall to prevent cold damage
Remove the mulch in the early spring
Leave space between plants for runners to produce daughter plants and increase your patch

How to Grow Strawberries

Plant strawberry crowns or starter plants in early spring. Although you can see seeds in the berries themselves, they aren’t typically grown from seeds. Strawberry crowns are typically sold in boxes during winter and early spring at most home and garden stores.

Planting Strawberry Crowns

To plant strawberry crowns, plant the crown in a shallow hole with the top portion sticking out. Do not plant them too deeply or they will rot.

An easier method of growing strawberries is to wait just a little bit longer until the plants arrived in the garden centers. I buy at least six every year and set them out in the garden as soon as I buy them in April.

Strawberry Life Cycle

Strawberries begin waking up as soon as soil temperatures reach around 50 degrees. Once they grow, they produce flowers, which after pollination become a strawberry. It takes only a few days for a strawberry to ripen fully; they do not ripen after picking, so don’t pick them white and hope they ripen to red later on.

After bearing fruit, strawberries send forth long stems called runners. Along the runner and at the tip, a new plant forms. The daughter plant at the end of the runner sets down roots and grows into a new plant, increasing your strawberry patch.

Care of Strawberry Plants

Strawberries require full sunlight and rich, loamy soil. Add plenty of compost to the soil before planting. I top dress my patch with extra compost and mushroom soil, a by product of the mushroom growing industry sold as compost, in early spring after I remove the mulch.

Mulching strawberries before winter sets in is very important. Pine straw, the brown needles that fall from pine trees, is the easiest and in my case free method of mulch available. I live on a pine tree farm so I just rake it up from the edge of the woods and spread it over my strawberry patch in the late fall before the first hard frost. The mulch keeps the strawberry plants from heaving, or pushing out of the ground.

Types of Strawberries

Strawberries come in several different types. The June-bearing varieties are as the name suggests plants that bear in mid to late spring – June in some parts of the country, May where I live in Virginia. The June bearing plants provide the large strawberries you see in the stores although home-grown ones rarely attain the same enormous sizes found in supermarkets.

Everbearing strawberries produce one big crop in spring and a second crop in the fall. The berries taste just as sweet, but they tend to be smaller than the June bearing kinds. There are also Alpine strawberries, which are the smallest, and wild strawberries.

For a full list of strawberry varieties, visit this guide to strawberries.