After winter was over, I checked on my strawberries and saw these cute little overwintered plants, like so:
I thought, hey, no problem, I’ll just dig them out and put them in the new cedar beds — right? Well, I was wrong. Those cute tiny plants had taken over most of the wine barrel with their roots, so they all had rootballs about 2-3x the size of the plant:
Some even had roots that went all the way to the very bottom of the planter:
The trick to removing the plants from their current location was to dig around them, lifting up all the plants in a huge dirt clod, and then gentle teasing each plant and its rootball out. Established, winter-dormant plants don’t need all of their roots, but getting as much as you can doesn’t hurt. While removing the plants from their previous location, you might as well prune them at the same time by carefully plucking any unhealthy leaves or old stems from the crown of the plant.
Replanting the strawberries is not difficult, but you do need to exercise some care in your placement. Strawberries like to be buried with the crown of the plant just above the soil surface — too deep and you bury the crown, too shallow and the roots are exposed to the elements. Once you have found your perfect planting depth, hold the plant at the right height with one hand while lightly filling in around the hole with the other.
Once your plant is placed, give it a slight hill around the roots to keep water off the crown and feeding directly into the roots.
Other posts in this series: The Nearly-Spring 2010 Update on Strawberries, Building the Strawberry Beds
Nikole Gipps is a detail-oriented web developer, mud-loving Cornell Aggie, avid gardener, occasional iron chef, patient wife and fun mom of two. You can follow her work at That PHP Girl or see all of her feeds at NikoleGipps.com.
