Lidl Everbearing Strawberry baskets - Which kind are they? and any tips!

liamtech

Hi All

Just posting here about the strawberry basket which was on sale a while ago in Lidl.

I have been growing June Bearing strawberry plants for a few years, but have been slightly disappointed this season. I have a mixture of new, and mature plants, including Symphony, Elsanta, and Allegro (i think i have the names right?). I keep a few runners each year but this season was a bit of a letdown, with many small, malformed, and incorrectly pollinated berries. I was just about content that the season was over, and i would try again next year.

Lidl had a hanging basket of ‘Everbearing Strawberry Plants’, which I decided to purchase for 7 euro, first week in June. It seemed like a good idea, to maybe extend the season a bit. And I am very glad i did. I am getting sweet delicious berries, of more than adequate size, and at varying quantities. What I find far more impressive, is that the runners are rooting very easily, and given good compost, they themselves are beginning to flower and fruit! Iv redoubled my efforts to collect and cultivate runners for these, because they are the most impressive Everbearers that I have had.

The trouble is I know nothing about them!! Hence I’m posting here to see if anyone can shed some light on these!

• Does anyone know what cultivar they are? Il be including a picture below, of both the mother plants in the Lidl Basket, and one or two impressive runner plants – the flowers are pink btw, and this is the only noticeable difference between these plants and my June Bearers. They were not labelled as anything other than ‘everbearing’ –

• My experience with Everbearing Strawberries up until now has been fairly poor. Far more so than their June Bearing brethren! And I am out of touch with caring for these guys. Should i continue to add new compost throughout the season? Would some well rotted manure be a bit much at this stage in the year?

• Am I wrong to keep cultivating runners at this stage? My only wish is to keep this lineage going into future seasons. My wife and I have an allotment, and we could definitely see a way to hand over one or two raised beds to these guys next year.

• I am kicking myself for not breaking up the ‘mothership’ basket when I first bought it in early June. It’s so clearly inadequate for such a fine producing bunch of plants. Indeed one plant seemed to give up earlier in the season. Should I wait until the end of the season to break it up into larger containers? Or perhaps between harvests? Like I said above, I’m thinking that these will either end up in 200 litre wooden planters, and/or my allotment raised beds. While i have the extablished runners doing the business, i would like to keep hold of the source for as long as possible

Really appreciate your thoughts folks, and if i have missed a pre-existing thread on these, please feel free to redirect me, while accepting my apologies!

Sincere thanks

Liamo!

Pic 1 - the basket - you can only barely see the basket itself, but its red, and was designed to hang. I removed its hanger, as we dont have any place for hanging baskets

Pic two - believe it or not this is a runner which rooted, and was seperated about 4 weeks ago. I have about 6 of these runners, and about 4 more up and coming which could easily grow to the same size. The visible flower stalk aside, there are another two stalks coming up fast, so to me it seems like a single runner is giving epic returns! :)

looksee

You have done much better with that than one we had a couple of years ago, pathetic few strawberries. This year seems to have been good for strawberries, once I saved them from the blackbirds we had amazing crops.