flowerbug
Garden Master
What's your secret? I've failed at growing strawberries!
they are woodland edge plants which pop up any time there are disturbances and then they travel. birds spread their seeds.
for best results you want full sun, plenty of organic material and room to spread.
once they are established then you want to remove the older plants and let them retake that area over again. keep them weeded and don't let them get overgrown. deer will eat them. birds, raccoons, groundhogs, etc will all want to eat the berries.
i've grown thousands and thousands of them in four large patches for years until the deer found them and then systematically ate them all except for the patch inside the fenced gardens which i kept going for some years until a few years ago when i turned it under until i can get the weeds back under control and also make sure no poison ivy is starting in there again.
the right varieties should be winter hardy for your area. i've no had any issues with them here other than what i mentioned above about frost heave - that is they need to be well established before winter comes along or you can mulch over them once the cold weather arrives so they are protected during the winter but when spring comes along you want to remove the covering mulch so they don't get crown rot.
when you have plenty of runners available it is easy to restart any strawberry patch.
as an example of what can happen i started with five strawberry plants for one patch, by the end of the first season i had over a hundred starts pegged down in pots so i could move them plus i'd given away about twenty of them to someone else who wanted to start a patch. within a few years i had four large patches going and eventually i added another variety to the gardens but they didn't really do much in comparison to the others.
so one suggestion would be to keep your varieties in different patches instead of mixing them together.
