How To Choose A Variety And Grow Remontant Strawberries

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Strawberry harvest … before frost

• The difference between remontant strawberries and garden strawberries
• Remaining strawberry varieties
• Strawberry disease prevention
• Feeding strawberries
• Slug fighting
• Strawberry planting care
• How to prolong the fruiting of strawberries

The difference between remontant strawberries and garden strawberries

It seems that remontant strawberries appeared only because a person wanted to extend the season of consumption of these magical tasty berries. For ordinary garden strawberries, the main harvest wave occurs in June, sometimes a couple of more berries will ripen in July - and that's it, the bushes will go on a well-deserved rest, until next year, leaving us some kind of sadness. That is why the breeders decided to please gardeners, who happily began to acquire the fruits of their creations and plant remontant strawberry bushes in their plots, which continuously forms berries until almost mid-autumn, before frost.

The remontant strawberry is characterized by a long period of both flowering and fruiting. It usually lasts about 120 days and is due to a peculiar feature of the growth of shoots and inflorescences. In order for fully developed flower buds to form, remontant strawberry varieties need a high daily temperature - at + 15 … + 17 ° С and daylight hours equal to 15-17 hours, while ordinary strawberry garden flower buds lays in the fall, when it is enough cold, and daylight hours are only 10-12 hours.

Terminal, apical and low-lying inflorescences are formed on the horn of remontant strawberries, while under conditions of a long day and high temperatures, they develop extremely quickly, in just a couple of weeks, which is why remontant cultivars are so fast-growing.

Remaining strawberry varieties

The most common varieties of remontant strawberries today are Ada, Mount Everest, Sakhalin, Selva, Moscow delicacy, Red Rich, Star and Geneva.

The so-called photoneutral varieties have also appeared, they differ from conventional and remontant cultivars in that they can be programmed to receive production approximately 90 days after planting, within a year, but in this case it is necessary to acquire heated greenhouses.

In the open field, such varieties give ripe berries from late June to late autumn, in fact, until the first real frost. Varieties of this type include Tribute, Tristar, Brighton, Ulster and Hummy Genta, but it will be difficult to propagate them at home, since they form a mustache at least, but this simplifies and reduces the cost of caring for the plantation.

By the way, about leaving: for strawberries to be able to give both the first and second harvest, it is necessary to increase the degree of re-flowering, and for this, mowing or the usual cutting of leaves should be carried out immediately after the first harvest at the beginning of summer, but without damaging the apical buds.

Repairing strawberry varieties are also good because, unlike ordinary strawberries, they bear fruit even on the rosettes of the mustache, there are examples of such varieties - these are Geneva, Cardinal. Leaves of these cultivars should not be cut off. This, by the way, is a very useful sign, because plants are actually capable of producing good yields on the rosettes newly formed on the mustache, and it often happens that these mustaches do not even have time to acquire their roots. This allows you to create gorgeous, often very dense vertical walls in the garden, simply by tying the mustache on a netting or other upward support.

Strawberry disease prevention

Remontant strawberries are an excellent culture, but, alas, even its diseases were not spared, and quite often the fruits are affected by gray rot. To do this, at home, they can be treated with a 2% solution of potassium chloride or a simple infusion of ash, for which they take 400-500 g of ash and dissolve in a standard bucket of water.

After such treatment, it is desirable to feed the plants with mineral fertilizers, ammonium sulfate, superphosphate, potassium sulfate (20-25 g) are suitable here. Top dressing is strongly recommended to be combined with watering, preferably under the root and water at room temperature, then you should loosen the soil and slightly spud the bushes.

Feeding strawberries

If your plans include getting large yields, then the plants should be planted in a sufficiently lit and well-fertilized area. Since remontant strawberries form a large number of generative organs and inflorescences, they also require a lot of nutrition. Plants respond well to feeding with slurry, which should be carried out every two weeks. The slurry to water ratio is 1: 9. It is very useful to add 150-200 g of ash to the solution in terms of 10 liters of solution. The consumption rate of such a top dressing is a bucket for 5 square meters of land.

As soon as the plants bloom, one more feeding is needed. In order for strawberry bushes to tie more large fruits, they can be treated with mineral fertilizers containing manganese, zinc and boron, the usual consumption rate is 2 g per bucket of water. These sprays should be carried out in the evening when the heat subsides, or in cloudy weather, when it is cool, but not in the rain.

Slug fighting

Slugs also harm the berries; in years when there are especially many of them, they can destroy almost half of the crop, so measures should also be taken to combat them. First of all, it is dusting the soil along the rows with a mixture of tobacco dust, ash and lime in equal proportions. In dry weather, dusting the soil with superphosphate helps to fight slugs.

Strawberry planting care

In addition to combating pests and diseases, you need to monitor the condition of the soil, periodically loosen the surface, providing air access to the roots, weed weeds, water and mulch the soil with humus or non-acidic peat. It is very useful to loosen the soil after watering or heavy rain, closing moisture from evaporation.

How to prolong the fruiting of strawberries

In order to stretch autumn fruiting, remontant strawberries can be placed under a film. The plants located under it will tolerate temperature drops at night and even in small frosts without loss. At the same time, fruiting will be abundant, and the film will help reduce the risk of gray rot, and it will be difficult for slugs to get into such a greenhouse.

Strawberries usually begin to shelter in mid-August, the film is pulled over pre-installed metal arcs, which look like a tunnel, designed according to the size of the garden bed. Having covered the plants, you will need to monitor the air temperature. If it rises above + 25 ° C, then, in order to avoid burns, the plants will need to raise the film, thereby leveling the temperature.

Otherwise, there is nothing new in caring for remontant strawberries under a film, these are the same loosening of the soil, weed control, watering.

Shelters are usually removed after the onset of cold weather. During this period, however, there is a risk that the plants will be damaged by the first severe frosts, while sufficient snow cover has not yet formed. Therefore, to strengthen the plants and prepare them for frost, you should feed the strawberries with wood ash at the rate of - a tablespoon per bush, loosen the soil, sprinkle the bushes with soil or humus or non-acidic peat to a height of 7-9 cm, manually lifting the leaf mass. Dry sawdust is also suitable as mulch; a layer of 4-5 cm is enough here.

Already on top of the mulch layer, you can throw snow after it falls out. Under such a shelter, plants overwinter without problems.

Nikolay Khromov,

Candidate of Agricultural Sciences,

Researcher, Department of Berry Crops,

GNU VNIIS im. I. V. Michurina,

member of the R&D Academy

Photo by Olga Rubtsova