The Grounded Orchardist

So you want to grow wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca) in your garden. The chance to step out of your back door and pick a few of these small but packed full of flavour berries. You cannot buy the berries in the supermarket, so what a great addition to your fruit patch or an edible amongst your ornamentals. It’s much easier than you may think.

Where should I plant my wild strawberries?

Now I always get caught up in the excitement and rush ahead without thinking. I will impulse buy, sow or propagate without thinking “where am I actually going to put these plants?” Think about where wild strawberries grow, they like partial shade so make sure they get some sun in order to fruit well. However, they really are quite forgiving! Also known as Alpine strawberries this gives you an idea of their will to survive.

If your plants are doing well, they can become invasive. So putting them in a flower border could need a bit of management to keep them under control.

You can easily grow them in pots. I grow mine in pots. However, I would argue they would do better in the ground. If growing wild strawberries in pots remember to keep the soil moist. Pots dry out quicker than the ground, although your plants can cope with a bit of drought, it really does set them back.

Or, if you have an orchard, why not grow them at the foot of your trees. We can tick a few boxes here. Wild strawberries are good ground cover, an edible, like dappled shade but will also thrive in full sun and will help you fight against soil erosion under the trees. Keeping the ground moist which is beneficial for the tree and plant.

Pests and diseases

They don’t really have many pests and diseases. I have found birds, slugs and snails are the main culprits with these. Fungal diseases can be a problem so ensuring there is airflow around your plants and cutting away any mould will help combat that.

Propagating wild strawberries

The propagation of wild strawberries is easy. You can either cut off and plant the runners or propagate by division of the plant itself. Or you can easily grow from seed in spring.

Rejuvenating a wild strawberry patch

So, we moved house and as always the plants suffer a bit. It could be because they have been squashed or taken out of the ground or just a new microclimate.

Our wild strawberries were no exception, they were crispy as they had dried out due to neglect and very leggy. However, there is a glimmer of hope as the middles were still green. Here are my tips to rejuvenate them.

• Take the plants out of the soil
• Pull or cut apart individual plants ensuring you have roots on each piece. Good news… you will probably end up with more plants than when you started!
• Prune off any crispy, brown, dry stems. You want to keep any healthy green growth, no matter how small. (See pics below)
• Plant back in soil, put in shade or semi shade, keep watered

It only took two weeks for the transformation you can see below. The left picture below shows after I had cut off the dead material. The right shows the transformation in two weeks.

So, if your wild strawberries are looking ropey, brown and crispy don’t give up and buy more. They want to survive, they have to in the wild and are much more robust than our domestic strawberries.