strawberry thinning

I planted strawberries last spring, this year they look wonderful, full, gave me a nice amt of berries this last month (they are june-bearing). My problem is when I planted them, I probably planted them too close together and I never kept them in rows. So now my bed is full of strawberry plants. Yesterday I tried to pull some plants out in the middle and transplant them into an adjoining space, but they are really packed in there. My question is, should I leave them the way they are and chalk it up to lesson-learned, or should I run a tiller straight down them and recreate the rows, and if so, should I do that now or wait until next spring? I'm afraid the overcrowding might eventually kill off my bed.

Any ideas?

Till them now. The overcrowding is definitely not good for them.

You want ~1 foot apart minimum distance between plants or harvest will be reduced. And yes, your harvest can dwindle to nothing if the plants are too tightly packed.

I'm having sort of the same problem too. Although I have rows, with all the runners that they are putting out, the plants are getting very close together. Feldon, when you say they should be 1 ft apart, how far apart do I need to plant them to take in account the runners they will put out? Also, if the mother plants have runners that have not set roots (which is the case with almost all the plants) should I wait to do the thinning out? How long with the mother plants send out runners? Thanks for all the advice.

You're supposed to thin them out to 1 ft apart after they finish fruiting, so that the runners will start new plants. Essentially, you rip almost all of them out and start over, every year.

If you can identify the mothers, take those ones out and leave the daughters.

So should I replant the mothers? And what if the daughter plants haven't taken root yet...should I move the mother and runners? Sorry to intrude on your post, KarenNEIA...

If they haven't taken root yet, then they're probably great-great-granddaughters.

Strawberries, left to their own devices, would soon occupy all the available space in the universe.

Maybe they would...but could you ever have too many strawberries to eat?! Yummy!!

Um ... yes. And too many to pick. At least, so it seems here, by the end of every June.

With 7 kids, there's never such a thing as too many strawberries...or any kind of food for that matter...and my boys aren't even teenagers yet!!

If you get get them to pick the berries!

But for maximum yield, you don't want the plants to crowd up together. You get lots of leaves and vines, and molds and fungus, but fewer and smaller berries.

Ha Ha!! Picking is not an option...if they want to eat, they've got to pick ! :) We just picked 105 pounds of blueberries today. I guess we'll start thinning the strawberries out ASAP...always something to keep on top of!

That's a lot of blueberries! How many bushes do you have?

Well, we planted 21 this year..several have died, but it will still be years before we get berries from them. These came from a local u pick it. Making jam, syrup and pie filling.

"No rest for the Gardener!"