How To Grow Strawberries From Seed

Strawberries are relatively straightforward to grow from seed, and when started early enough, they will also fruit in their first year.

So if you are on a bit of a budget or just want to try growing them from seed, follow along with my guide below.

Type of Strawberry Plant

There are a few different kinds of strawberry plants available, each with different characteristics.

• Alpine - Also known as wild strawberries. They are tough plants that produce very small but very sweet fruit over a long period.
• Ever Bearing - These plants can produce multiple harvests a year, unlike a regular strawberry, which fruits once and is then done for the year. The downside is that the fruit are usually smaller than a regular summer fruiting kind.
• Summer Bearing - These are your standard strawberries and are definitely the more common type. They will produce all of their fruit close together over a period of 2-3 weeks. Usually, these are your larger berries.
• Day Neutral - As the name suggests, these strawberries don't rely on day length to decide when to fruit. Instead, they do it whenever the conditions are right. They can produce until late in the season but tend to produce smaller fruit than summer-bearing plants.

Sowing Strawberries

You want to start strawberries off indoors early in the year (Jan-March). This gives them enough time to grow and fruit in their first year.

If you've seen my other posts then you will already know that whenever I sow indoors I use coir compost (the stuff with added feed in). I do this because its easier than having a bag of compost in the house and you also don't need to worry about fungus gnats!

Use a propagator and fill it with your chosen compost. If you don't have a propagator then why not give my milk bottle propagator a try - it works great with strawberries.

Strawberry seeds are tiny, and germination rates arent amazing. So sow a few seeds per module.

Place the seeds on the surface and then go round and press them into the soil to ensure they make good contact but don't bury the seeds.

Water the soil well and pop on your propagator lid, and don't forget to label! I like to write the sowing date on the label just for my own knowledge and so I can look back in the summer and see if there was any difference between different sowing times.

Strawberries can be slow at germination, so it could be 2-3 weeks before you see any action.

I keep them inside all this time and under grow lights. If you don't have lights then a sunny windowsill will do.

Potting On

Once your seedlings have established themselves and have their first "true" leaves then it is time to pot them on into individual pots.

Hardening Off

Once the risk of frost has passed you need to start moving your young plants outside in a process called hardening off.

Take them out a bit at a time, during the day only initially, before leaving them out for longer and only bringing in if cold weather is predicted.

After a couple of weeks of hardening off they will be ready to go into their final growing positions.