Strawberries are known to spread. A year or two ago we bought two plants at a farmers market and made a strawberry bed out of an old pond. We converted the pond to a planter by drilling a bunch of large holes in the bottom for drainage and filling with rock, sticks, and compost. We thought the strawberries would need a few years to fill the bed, but in a little over one season they were spilling out on every side.
This winter we bought two more corrugated metal raised bed to fill with overflow strawberries. The hope is that the raised beds will deter more rabbits, but if that doesn’t work alone, I’ve interplanted with onion sets this first year, which should do the trick. I took most of the babies from the original bed and planted them in the back-halves of the new beds, knowing that they will spread forward towards the sun. We’re still filling in the area around the beds with stone.
These photos are from late winter when the infrastructural work of installing and filling the beds was done, along with yard clean-up and burning. The strawberry plants are now 8-inches tall and starting to bear fruit.
