Homegrown strawberries taste better than anything you can buy in a supermarket
Image: Strawberry ‘Vibrant’ from Thompson & Morgan

If you like growing delicious strawberries we’re delighted to bring you a collection of the best advice from the internet. These bloggers, YouTubers and Instagrammers are people who practise what they preach, growing heavily-fruiting strawberry plants season after season, and sharing their knowhow so that you can enjoy a bumper crop too. Read on for some great strawberry-growing tips…

Ben – GrowVeg

Ben recommends planting your strawberries in a sunny spot and watering regularly
Image: GrowVeg

Choose the right strawberry varieties and you could be picking fruit from late spring right through to early autumn, says Ben from ever-popular gardening YouTube channel, GrowVeg. Here, he gives an excellent rundown of the best varieties to choose and how to grow them to max out on quantity and flavour. He says if you’re keen to try your hand at making jam, be sure to grow a strong maincrop strawberry, while for sheer intensity of flavour, you can’t beat the tiny fruits of alpine varieties.

Tanya – Lovely Greens

The French ‘Mara de Bois’ variety crops all summer long
Image: Thompson & Morgan

Strawberry plants yield fewer berries after the first few years, says Tanya of Lovely Greens. That’s why she pulls up her oldest rows of strawberries and replaces them with fresh plants each year. Tanya offers highly informative video tutorials including two ways to grow strawberries, her favourite fruit! We recommend her step-by-step guide to making a strawberry planter from an old pallet, and her excellent demo of how to rejuvenate your strawberry patch. This time around, she’s very excited to try Thompson and Morgan’s ‘Mara des Bois’ for the first time.

Carol – The Sunday Gardener

Amongst the strawberries recommended for container growing is ‘Honeoye’
Copyright: Photo Horticultural

Strawberries are best planted in the autumn, says Carol at The Sunday Gardener. But don’t worry if you’ve left it to the spring because they’ll grow vigorously at this time of year too, although you might get a slightly smaller harvest the first season. New to planting strawberries? Avoid planting them too deep. Carol says the crown – the part where the roots meet the stems – should be level with the soil, but not buried or it may rot.

Claire – Peg’s Plot

Strawberries ‘Just Add Cream’ are delicious eaten straight from the plant while warm from the sun
Image: @pegsplot

A great space saver, Claire @pegsplot says she’s reclaiming her raised beds and growing her strawberries in gutters attached to the side of her shed instead. It’s also a great way to keep her harvest away from hungry snails. Want to know what she grows? Strawberry ‘Just Add Cream’ is the name of this super sweet variety!

Thompson & Morgan

Strawberry plants are often delivered as strong, bare root runners
Image: Strawberry ‘Sweetheart’ from Thompson & Morgan

If you’re wondering which strawberries to grow, this post from our blog here at Thompson & Morgan, has just the info you’re looking for. For small, sweet berries from July through to September, choose Mignonette; if it’s a heavy fruiting plant that delivers large fruits ready for Wimbledon, ‘Sweetheart’ is your go-to choice. Do check out the post for ever-bearing varieties as-well-as great advice on how and where to plant your strawberries.

The Kitchen Garden with Eli & Kate

Eli picks a huge bowl of strawberries every day at harvest time!
Image: The Kitchen Garden with Eli & Kate

“You want to get in there with all your homemade compost, [and] lots of organic loveliness,” says Eli at The Kitchen Garden with Eli & Kate. She enjoyed a bumper crop in 2020 and is on hand to help you achieve your best harvest ever this season. Check out her post to discover her top five tips to help you have a successful strawberry growing season. Soil quality is number one. Visit The Kitchen Garden to find out what else you can do to boost your crop.

Lee – Project Diaries

This lidded chocolate eclair container makes a great propagator if you’re starting strawberries off from seed
Image: Project Diaries

Join Lee at Project Diaries as he shows you how to propagate and grow strawberries from seed harvested from a particularly tasty berry. While Lee acknowledges that you can’t guarantee the resulting strawberries won’t differ from the donor berry, when you can easily harvest 50 or more seeds from one fruit, the chances of creating some winners has to be high. And if you don’t want to collect the seed in this way, simply buy a packet of strawberry seeds and sow them the same way. A fun and informative video, you’ll also love Lee’s chocolate eclair box propagators – ingenious, cheap, and a great excuse for eating cake!

Tejvan – Gardeners Tips

The Cambridge strawberry varieties work well for forcing early crops
Image: Strawberry ‘Cambridge Favourite’ from T&M

Did you know it’s possible to get strawberries to fruit 4-8 weeks earlier than normal summer crops, and all without sacrificing flavour? As Tejvan at Gardener’s Tips explains, the old ways are still the best. Here he details how to force strawberries in the greenhouse or under cloches. He says if you’re growing under glass, “you want a strawberry with a compact habit and mildew resistance. Try one or more of the Cambridge varieties: Favourite, Regent, Rival, or Vigour.”

Mothin Ali – My Family Garden

Young plants formed from runners can be used to rejuvenate your tired strawberry bed
Image: My Family Garden

Are your strawberry plants a bit past their best? If so, you’ll love this video by My Family Garden. Here your green-fingered host explains how to strip out the old growth and replace it with young runners from the main plant. Replanting the runners in a freshly prepared no-dig bed, he also demonstrates why the no-dig method makes planting and growing so much easier – it’s all down to applying plenty of compost with a good mulch on top to suppress weeds.

Daniel – Mossy Bottom

Harvest strawberries as soon as they start to turn red and leave to ripen in a cardboard box
Image: Mossy Bottom

Strawberries are the king of all berries, says Daniel of the excellent YouTube channel, Mossy Bottom. His video How to Grow Strawberries for Self Sufficiency is a must for anyone who would like to know more about how to grow a bumper crop and make full use of the harvest. He recommends harvesting early to beat the slugs – strawberries will ripen indoor after they’re picked. He also swears by Hugelkultur mounds – a permaculture technique which uses decaying branches as a slow-release soil fertiliser.

Greg Grows UK

A punnet full of gloriously ripe strawberries is a thing of beauty
Image: @greggrowsuk

If you’d like to boost next year’s strawberry crop, Greg @greggrowsuk has this excellent hack to share: “Pot the little shoots (runners) up from this year’s growth by rooting them in compost before cutting from the main plant! These can be planted and will start to crop from next summer!” Check out his Insta post to see for yourself how successful this method is for Greg – when he posted this pic of his mouth watering fruit, he was already busy making his second batch of strawberry jam.

Tony – Simplify Gardening

Net your strawberries to stop birds stealing the entire crop
Image: Simplify Gardening

Avoid growing strawberries in ground that’s previously grown potatoes, tomatoes and chrysanthemums, says Tony at Simplify Gardening. These plants are particularly prone to the fungal disease verticillium wilt which also affects strawberries. Just one of Tony’s top ten tips for growing The Best Strawberries Ever, he also says you need sun, shelter and good, well drained soil. Do take a look at his video to find out what else you can do to grow better fruit this season.

Ally – Ancoxon

These strawberry runners are destined for space-saving hanging baskets
Image: Ancoxon

How do you get to enjoy a great harvest of delicious succulent strawberries without taking up space in the garden? Take a leaf from Instagrammer, Ally’s book. Posting at @Ancoxon, she says she grows her strawberry plants in hanging baskets – a great space-saving solution. A vegan, low-waste allotmenteer who also keeps rescue chickens, you’ll find some wonderful photographs of Ally’s feathered friends here, as well as inspirational snaps from the veg patch.

Sue – Green Lane Allotments

A weed control fabric reduces work and prevents fruit spoiling on damp soil
Image: Green Lane Allotments

“If you find a strawberry nibbled by slugs, don’t remove it,” says Sue at Green Lane Allotments. That’s because, rather than move onto a fresh berry, the slug will come back to the same fruit for it’s next nibble. If you’re skeptical, so was Sue, but it does seem to work and is definitely worth a try should your fruit suffer an attack. She also recommends laying a weed control fabric to keep the weeds down and berries clean.

Serena Lee

There are 40 strawberry plants in this ingenious vertical planter
Image: Serena Lee

If you’re experimenting with vertical growing to save space, this post is a must. Serena Lee grows her strawberries in a rack especially designed for the purpose. The result of a process of trial and error, she says the original pallet wood planter her husband made for her proved a great success until dry weather struck and most of her strawberry plants died. The solution was to build a new vertical strawberry planter complete with an automatic watering system – do take a look at Serena’s post for all the details.

Katie – The Marmalade Teapot

Preserve your strawberry gluts by making delicious jam
Image: The Marmalade Teapot

“If the craving for jam strikes, then there is no better way to satisfy it than strawberry,” says Katie at The Marmalade Teapot. She reckons “Homemade jam is easier to make than most people expect,” and to prove her point, gives you her delicious strawberry jam recipe plus instructions on how to make it. Worth a look for the photos of scrumptious-looking jam alone, this post is a must for anyone seeking a little bit of strawberry flavoured inspiration.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our collection of the best information and advice on growing your own strawberries. Head over to our strawberry hub page for more dedicated strawberry guides and links to all our exciting varieties available to buy. With a little bit of help from these amazing bloggers, YouTubers and Instagrammers, you’ll be growing your own bumper crops of juicy strawberries in no time. Tag us in to your pics!