After months of neglect, the strawberry patch in my raised bed garden has been putting out runners and daughter plants so I figured it was long overdue for some attention.
I’ve had success with strawberry plants in hot and sunny Hawaii Kai, both with plants purchased at local garden centers and ordering from Etsy. After researching the best cultivars for our tropical climate, I purchased Seascape everbearing strawberries on Etsy last year and they’ve taken over the raised bed.
I’ve only ever gotten fruit the size of nickel or quarter, but that may be because I don’t give them enough attention - or because I’m not at the higher elevations where strawberries thrive in the Hawaiian Islands. In any case, I do like to keep the bed filled with strawberry plants to share occasionally at plant shares and the free stores.
When I had these plants in separate pots and they threw runners, I was more successful at propagating the daughter plants because I could just stick a small pot of soil underneath the daughter and cut the cord, so to speak, once the daughter had established roots.
But now that they’re in the bed, the runners escape and dangle over the sides … so I decided to try to cut the runners and propagate the daughters anyway. I haven’t had much success at this in the past, but I hate to just throw away the daughter plants.
Because the bed is so overgrown, I decided to remove some of them and place them back in single pots- but this time with a fancy device to keep the leaves and potential strawberries off the soil.
I found these strawberry supports (10 pack for about $15 on Amazon) and will see if they help to A. grow bigger strawberries and/or B. enable me to better monitor for pests like mealybugs at the bottoms of the plants, which they are currently prone to in the bed right now.
