Remember Why They’re Called Strawberries
Mulching is a big advantage when growing strawberries and straw is the obvious choice. A thick layer of soft mulch does more than inhibit weeds and conserve water. It also keeps the roots cool, which strawberries like, and it keeps the fruits off the ground where they can get into all kinds of trouble with insects and pathogens.
If you don’t like the look of straw, consider grass clippings, shredded leaves or pine needles.
Strawberries need about 1 inch of water each week. The 2 most important times for Keeping them regularly watered are at planting and when the fruits are filling out. At planting time, the roots haven’t yet developed many tiny, fibrous, side roots that take in water and nutrients and they can become stressed if left to dry out for any amount of time. And since the strawberry fruits are plump with water, they will need a steady supply, the whole time the fruits are forming. thespruce
Set plants into multipurpose potting soil, spacing them 25-30cm (10-12in) apart.
When watering, try to keep moisture off the leaves to prevent fungal diseases getting a hold and spoiling the fruits. If you can, carefully lift the leaves to apply the water to your sunken pots. Your plants will also appreciate regular feeding with a high-potash liquid feed as soon as the first flowers appear – a brand sold for feeding tomato plants will work just fine for this purpose. growveg
They also tolerate a wide range of soil pH – 5.5 to 6.5.

Timing
Sow indoors in the winter. An earlier start may result in berries the first year. Start any time between December and the beginning of February. After that time, they will still work, but you will not harvest berries during the first season. Transplant out at least 3 weeks after last frost.

Starting
Germination is the trickiest aspect to growing strawberries. Be patient, and try the tricks below.

Tuck your strawberry seed packet inside a sealed plastic bag or airtight container and place in your freezer for 3-4 weeks. When you remove the bag or container, do not break the seal until it (and its living contents) have reached room temperature. This may take several hours. Err on the side of caution. Opening the package too quickly may result in water condensing on the cold seeds, and this will reduce your chances of success.

Once the sealed package has “thawed” to room temperature, you’re ready to plant. Sow the seeds on the surface of pre-moistened, sterilized seed starting mix in trays or small containers. Place these on a piece of felt or other thick cloth that has its end sitting in water. The idea is to wick up water from below so that the seedling medium stays constantly and evenly damp until germination.

Keep your seeded trays under bright fluorescent lights at a constant temperature of 18-24°C (65-75°F). Germination may take anywhere from 7 days to 6 weeks. Be patient. Once germination occurs, increase ventilation around your plants to prevent damping off.

Once your seedlings have their third true leaf, they can be transplanted into their own pots. Be sure to harden your seedlings off carefully and gradually before transplanting outside.

Growing
Space transplants 60cm (24″) apart in rows 90-120cm (36-48″) apart. Everbearing varieties (such as ours) tend to produce fewer runners, and will produce more fruit if the runners are removed. In the first year of growth, it may be preferable to encourage runners, and let them fill in the spaces between transplants with new offspring plants.

Grow strawberries in a well-drained, sandy loam that has been generously dug with organic matter such as finished compost or well-rotted manure. Dig ¼ cup complete organic fertilizer into the soil beneath each transplant. Keep soil moist, but not soggy. A mulch of straw around plants may help prevent the soil from drying out.

Companion Planting
These little plants respond strongly to nearby plants. Couple them with beans, borage, garlic, lettuce, onions, peas, spinach, and thyme. Avoid Brassicas and fennel.

Use plastic mulch-makes soil warmer. Day neutral strawberries produce 1 month earlier than June, the usual strawberry season.

MIgardener:
About strawberries and specifically fall strawberries these are an everbearing variety

I've found is that they can be really invasive and that's why I always keep them in a raised bed like this because if you have them on the ground they're gonna spread everywhere.

they can get out of control pretty quick as I discovered. I had a little bucket of some alpine strawberries and those things once they touch the ground it's off to the races and they will spread everywhere.

I started them this spring but they've all started to shoot out a lot of runners some are even fruiting which typically I don't let them do for the first year to let them really put a lot of energy into the roots but some of them just decided they wanted to.

while I was away for a couple weeks and and they're just kind of doing their own thing so they're not doing a half-bad it's really late in the fall and they're already producing still.

They're everbearing so assuming that we don't get a frost I might actually get some strawberries

I have a variety called Ozark. I have another one for its called I think it's a yellow strawberry it's really cool then I got actually the cuttings from a friend so he gave me one of the little cuttings or one of the rhizomes from the strawberries.

I was going to talk to you guys about is fall time. if you are in the northern hemisphere like we are and it gets sometimes below zero you don't want strawberries to be frozen to that especially in a raised bed they don't have a whole lot of insulation. They have just the soil that's around them and that sometimes isn't enough either especially gets down to negative numbers you want to forgive them for some protection.

There's still green right now. You can't really see them but they're still green. So I'm not gonna cover them yet but when you guys are heard of getting snow it's probably a good idea to start doing this.

What you want to do is you want to mulch with some leaves or some grass clippings just a very light mulching because you don't want the really cold weather to be exposed right to the rhizome otherwise it won't come back next year. Got a lot of problems with that over the past with my alpine strawberries. I'd have about half of them gone because they're in a bucket and so if I didn't insulate them well enough they would never come back so it's really key to make sure you insulate them well whether it be with hay leaves or whatever. That's really great another way that you can insulate them is once you put the leaves on it a lot of people say "oh well it all blows off" just take a garbage bag or something over your beds and and just staple it to the beds because you don't want the leaves blowing around obviously because then you lose your insulation so that's just that really quick thing.

The runners are the the babies of the strawberries. There's a couple things that you want to do to ensure that you have a really healthy plant next year and and also really good harvest next year as well because right about this time you're going to notice that your strawberries start sending out all these runners and they do that because they want to reproduce obviously they don't reproduce all the time via fruit they reproduce via runners.

Runners are one of the best ways to get your plants to reproduce because you can make an entire bed out of basically five plants which is awesome I don't know any other way you can do that and only takes about two years to do so it's awesome in that sense but but it really inhibits a good harvest as well because when they're setting out all those runners that's all energy leaving the plant and you want the plant to be healthy next year so it can produce a lot of flowers and fruit and it can't do that if it's producing.

If it's sending all of its energy in the late fall into producing runners for next year you're gonna have a lot of plants but a very poor harvest so what you want to do is basically what you want to do is you want to cut those runners now if they've already rooted which a lot of them probably already have. You want to cut them because those the new rooted runners the new rooted little baby plants can survive on their own they're officially self-sustaining. They're on their own once they have roots. So you can cut those, you can cut the umbilical cord of the mother plant to the runner and then that way the mother plant can actually start focusing more energy into building a good root system, a healthy rhizome and putting out a lot of energy into the roots so that in the springtime it can just explode, put out a lot of berries and provide you with a lot of fruit.

All these beautiful strawberry plants are still green so that's why I said I'm not gonna mulch them yet they're still growing and in fact you actually have a few with some strawberries right there.

These runners here, this is a main plan right here, you have this main runner and you get one of these little umbilical cords and at the end of it has a plant on it and that plant has some some beautiful roots here. It's a fully ready sustaining plant so just take that snip it right off if it has the roots if it doesn't wait a little bit for it to get roots and then find a spot where there isn't any any plants and plop it in the ground.
And it's gonna grow just fine.
It's not gonna die don't worry then you got another plant here with another with another strawberry obviously you get the umbilical cord coming back to the mother plant which is this one coming all the way to this and this has some roots on it so we're gonna snip it. Now normally you don't want to rip the plant out obviously if it's already rooted these just so happened to be growing right on the surface.

Here's another mother plant and as you guys can see there's a umbilical cord right here and the plant is actually rooted along the wall but it's actually rooted so we're just gonna do is either take scissors or just take our fingers and just snip that off, leave this in the ground because it's already rooted really well and in that way it's gonna grow and you have the umbilical cord cut so that this plant right here can continue putting out energy into fruit, flowers and better roots.

Now also what I'll typically do is in the fall I'm going to probably take off these berries now a lot of people say "oh we'll leave that on", I want some berries in the fall but it's really actually almost detrimental of the plant because when you're getting nights like this this is not anywhere near alright Barry this is going to be another twenty thirty days and so the plant is gonna be putting in a lot of energy into producing not only one fruit but two fruits three fruits four fruits and so you got four berries right here and what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna actually take my fingers and just snap that right off because all that would be great in theory to have some berries those were never going to be riping in the amount of time that we have left in the season so those have to go because now what it can do is that it actually can focus into producing either more leaves or better roots or sending sugars down into the rhizomes so that it can produce energy next year because you don't want it obviously producing something that it's not going to get a yield out of. If it's gonna ripen within a couple days I would have left it because then I could get a snack harvest it and it could then put energy in but those were nowhere near ripening.

So now you're gonna have a really healthy plant next year so keep that in mind as well is fruit and runners have to go in the fall so that the mother plants can also grow because your mother plants are going to be the healthiest ones. They're gonna be the ones that are going to produce the most and they're also going to produce next runners next year so it's a never-ending process.
Then the runners are going to produce more runners and those runners are going to become other plants and produce more runners and so like I said you're just gonna have a endless cycle of strawberry plants.

Tristan Strawberry Fragaria
This new everbearing strawberry produces lots of beautiful deep rose flowers and an abundant harvest of sweet fruit all summer. The runnerless plants are perfect for pots or smaller gardens. farmerseed