Second year strawberry plants

Geoff Langford

When I first started in strawberry world back in the early 1970’s, most growers throughout the country, and particularly in the South Island, would keep plants for multiple years.  Some growers around the country still keep plants for more than a season.

Our variety trial has shifted from my home place to our new tunnel on campus and that left me with the dilemma of what to do with the old plants.  We have no data on what happens with 2^nd year plants with the modern varieties, so I thought it would be fun to get some data.  We don’t have any funding for this trial so I am doing it in my own time as a “just for fun” exercise.

As part of the trial, I went through and crown thinned some of the plants, left some of them “entire”, emptied some of the bins and replaced the mix so have the following combinations to test out:

• 2nd yr plants old mix – not crown thinned
• 2^nd yr plants old mix – crown thinned down to 2 crowns
• 1^st yr plants old mix
• 1^st year plants new mix

Recording the number of crowns proved to be more difficult than you might expect and it was only during the crown removal process that I started to realize that there are more crowns on a one year old strawberry plant than you might think.  It wasn’t unusual on some plants to have 7 or 8 crowns.  I thinned these by hand down to 2 crowns which was quite a laborious process.  I remember back in the 70’s, growers in Canterbury used to wait for a Norwest day in winter and then go over the beds with a road sweeper to clean up all the old foliage and achieve this type of result.

I have learned a lot from this trial.  The 2^nd year plants have been great in terms of a massive peak of relatively early fruit.  The ultimate was Royal Royce that has produced an average of 277g/plant by the 8^th December.  That compares with 93g/plant at the same time last year from the same first year plants!  

However the downside is small fruit.  The 2^nd year plants are averaging 15.7g/fruit compared with the first year plants at 20.3.  The other downside is that there are virtually no flowers coming through and that would seem to be pretty much it for production for a while.

While they had a decent spring flush of fruit, notice the lack of flowers at this point. And yes, they could have used more fertilizer this spring.

Crown thinning has only reduced the amount of this early fruit and not something I can see any value in at the moment.  There may be a response later but we will wait and see. The small fruit has been the real pain and big fruit with modern varieties is something we now take for granted and has a huge impact on picking rates.

Of interest is going to be the performance of 1^st year plants in old mix.  There has been some work done in Tasmania with re-using old mix and the answer was pretty positive.  The idea of just cutting the old plants off and then turning the old bags over and re-using them appeals to my old fashioned sense of making full use of resources.  There will be a few tricks to managing old mix and we will need to be wary of carrying over root diseases.  I didn’t fertilise my bins early enough but they are going well now and the concept looks promising.

So would I keep 2^nd year plants again?   The answer is pretty simple – hell no!

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