Fragaria × ananassa
A perennial that pays for a little patience: plant in spring, pinch off the first flowers, and the bed fruits for three or four years. The two decisions that matter are the type, which sets when you pick, and the crown depth, which decides whether the plant lives.
Hardy in zones 3a–10b
Needs 200–300 hours of winter chill below 45 °F (7 °C) to flower and fruit
Pollinated by insects — fruit sets only where bees and other pollinators reach the flowers. Flowers are self-fertile but each berry needs 200 or more pollinated pistils to form evenly, and bees and hoverflies do most of that work; poorly pollinated flowers give small, lumpy, nubbly fruit. Keep covers off during bloom, avoid spraying anything in flower, and expect misshapen early berries after cold wet weather when few insects fly. The plant itself is hardy to −12 °C under mulch but open blossoms are killed at −1 °C.
Full sun, eight hours or more; shade means leaves, runners and sour fruit.
Shallow roots and a lot of leaf: 25 mm a week, up to 50 mm in heat, never letting the top few centimetres dry out while fruit is swelling.
A rich, slightly acid, well-drained bed, raised if the ground is heavy, with no potatoes or tomatoes grown there in the last three years.
A light balanced feed at planting, then feed June-bearers once after harvest and day-neutrals monthly through the season; never heavily in spring.
No support; the work is pinching the first flowers, managing runners and cutting the bed back after harvest.
Pick when the berry is red all the way to the tip, then leave it one more day; it does not ripen after picking.
Berries
Ready 60–420 days from sowing
28–42 days after flowering
Red to the tip and glossy, 20 to 40 mm; the cap comes away with the fruit when pinched.
Pick at 3/4 – 1 1/2 in (20–40 mm)
Harvest every year — a perennial
Keeps 2–5 days — fridge
Day-neutrals from about 60 days after planting; June-bearers the spring after planting, about 5 weeks after bloom, for 3 weeks. Beds crop well for 3 to 4 years.
Bare-root or potted crowns settling in, with the first flowers pinched off.
Leafy growth and runners through the first summer; day-neutrals begin to crop.
Under straw for the winter; the plants need nothing but protection from hard freezes.
White flowers open in spring; an open blossom dies at −1 °C, so cover on frost nights.
Berries swelling and ripening over three to four weeks; pick every other day and keep the fruit dry.
June-bearers mown, thinned and fed to reset the bed; the plants build next year's crowns through late summer.
June-bearing
One heavy crop of the largest berries over three weeks in late spring, set from flower buds made the previous autumn. Grown in a matted row, no fruit in year one, renovated after every harvest.
Day-neutral
Flowers and fruits in flushes from early summer to frost whenever it is 10 to 24 °C, with a light crop in the first year. Grown as spaced plants with every runner cut; best in containers.
Everbearing
The older two-crop type: a spring flush and a second in late summer or autumn, smaller than a June crop. Grown like day-neutrals in hills or pots; few runners.
Stages affected: Flowering · Fruiting
A small, quick, mottled brown bug that feeds on flower buds, blossoms and shoot tips of strawberries, beans, peppers, celery, lettuce and hundreds of weeds. On strawberries its feeding on the developing seeds gives the hard, seedy, cat-faced berries that gardeners usually blame on frost or poor pollination.
Stages affected: Fruiting · At planting
Soft-bodied molluscs that feed at night and in wet weather, rasping holes in leaves. Seedlings and low soft foliage are the most at risk, and a single night can take out a row of young plants.
Stages affected: Flowering · Fruiting
The soft grey fuzz that turns ripe strawberries, raspberries, grapes and tomatoes to mush within a day of warm wet weather, and rots the crowded centres of low herbs such as thyme. One fungus with hundreds of hosts, living on dead plant material everywhere; on fruit it infects the flowers at bloom and waits in the green fruit until it ripens. Wet tissue, crowded plants and overripe or damaged growth are what it needs.
Stages affected: Vegetative · Post-harvest
Mites under 1.3 mm that feed on the undersides of leaves and spin fine webbing. Populations explode in hot dusty dry conditions and after broad-spectrum sprays kill their predators.
Stages affected: Vegetative · Fruiting
A soil fungus that enters through the roots and grows up inside the water-carrying tissue, so the plant wilts with the soil still wet. Its host list is enormous — mint, tomato, aubergine, potato, strawberry, raspberry, many trees and shrubs — and the fungus persists in soil for years as tiny resting bodies, which is why there is no cure and why rotation has to be long. On mint it is the reason commercial plantings are moved and the reason a home clump is worth starting from clean stock rather than a scrap from a neighbour.
Stages affected: Vegetative · Dormant · At planting
Soil-borne water moulds that rot the roots and crown of plants growing in soil that stays saturated: fruit and nut trees, strawberries (where one species causes red stele), raspberries, peppers and many ornamentals. They need free water to swim to the roots, so this is a drainage and watering disease above all. Once the crown is rotted there is no cure; everything is prevention.
Stages affected: Vegetative · Flowering
Small soft-bodied sap-sucking insects that cluster on the softest new growth. They reproduce extremely fast in warm weather and are the main insect vector of plant viruses in the garden.