Strawberry Plants - a public service announcement

Do you like strawberries? I do, too! Fancy that! What's that, you say? You're thinking about putting some in to your garden as a groundcover? Well, strawberries could be a groundcover with the added bonus of fruit in the early summer. Yeah! Sounds great!

Back AWAY from the strawberry plants, my friend.

Strawberry plants are The Borg of garden plants. Oh yeah, they look cute and helpless, but once you put in one plant, it's all over. See, they aren't like other plants. Oh no... They replicate themselves around your garden in 2.5 seconds. They go CRAZY in a short period of time.

Go on, ask me how I know.

Some birds relocated strawberry seeds from the plants in my raised beds in the backyard, to the corner of my front yard. Cool! Thought I. Little did I know. So I left it alone, thinking:

• Strawberry plants = yummy strawberry goodness

Nope. Instead:

• Strawberry plants = MORE strawberry plants

In one summer they've gone from a 2' section to spreading out 10' in a 90 degree arc. They are a lovely groundcover. So tough that they're outcompeting the plants I grew lovingly from seed this spring. Remember those? All 484 of them grown from seed? (I love that I'm not even making that number up!) The strawberry plants are busy throwing out teeny tiny other strawberry plants. They're outcompeting BINDWEED.

I kid you not. The bindweed was languishing under all that strawberry.

One plantlet sends out another plantlet, it has a good look around at the perennials it landed right next to and it thinks, "I can take 'em!". Then it sends out 84 other plantlets and they have a plant orgy. So there you are, objecting to all of those plants who have the audacity to not produce even a single strawberry! OK, maybe the birds got them, but honestly! So I just spent the last 2 hours ripping out strawberry plants in that 90 degree arc. Except for those in the corner, by the sprinkler, because I promised my brother he could have them. He'd better hurry up, though. They've got designs on the rest of my garden.

Did you hear that?

They're growing back!