Strawberries are perennials - they live for several years - and fruiting gets better until they are 3 or 4 years old. It is best to replace them then, to avoid decreasing yields. There are two ways of doing this, expensive and cheap, although the cheap method involves rather more labour. You can buy new plants, or you can propagate your own from the old plants. Today I started on the latter. After fruiting, strawberry plants put out runners, which is their method of vegetative reproduction. The new plant is part of the old, so will always come true, unlike the seeds, which can give variable plants depending on how they were pollinated. By August, each plant will have put out a number of runners. Some will just look like long tendrils, but small plants will be growing, and rooting themselves, along and at the end of, the runners. So I chose a dozen of the better looking runners and potted them up whilst still attached to the parent plant. These will root in the 3" pots that I used, and next spring can be cut off the parents and planted where I want them. The pots were sunk into the ground and watered well. All other runners were cut off and discarded. The small plants will take a year or two to establish and grow before they fruit as well as the older plants, but by growing on runners every year, the yield can be maintained. I also weeded the strawberry plot, which was long overdue!
Because of the dry weather - it did not rain at all for about 9 weeks, until 2 weeks ago - a lot of things either finished early or did not mature properly. Broccoli was a good example of this. Last year, it was excellent, with plump, tender heads, but this year it has basically gone to seed without heading up. Runner beans all came in a rush, but have stabilised somewhat now it is wetter. I have been watering courgettes nearly every day, and they have loved the weather. I grew an extra plant this year, but needn't have done so, as we now have more than 20 in the fridge, despite using them every day, in one form or another! I've also been picking beetroot, spring onions, carrots and French beans. Nearly all my potatoes are in store, and I have started picking sweetcorn - delicious! They were 'knee high by the fourth of July' as they should have been, but they also love the hot weather, and have come very early, at least two weeks. All of my white onions are now drying off, but my red onions are a little bit later. It's our autumn show in 3 weeks time, but I suspect that nearly everything will have finished by then.
