by Lydia Holley March 8, 2021
Before the freeze hit, Master Gardener Sara Drummond took steps to save her strawberry plants. She credits the video on the Henderson County Master Gardener (HCMGA) Facebook page (facebook.com/hcmastergardener) posted by Janelle Cole, showing how to prepare for the cold. Drummond says, “I completely covered the strawberries in my raised beds with hay. After that, I threw a frost blanket on top of the hay and laid a piece of cattle panel on top.”
She left them covered for a week. Afterward, she was “nervous about what I’d find when all the layers were removed.” She was concerned the plants would be “black gooey mush. But nope, they looked exactly the same. Most pleasing of all was that a couple of plants still had good-looking blossoms on them.”
Drummond usually purchases new strawberry plants in fall for a spring harvest. These certain strawberry plants, however, were a bit more special to her because she had propagated them herself. She explains, “Normally toward the end of harvest season, I am battling fungus so much, I am ready to let the plants go. But last summer, the plants survived the fungus pressure and were looking very healthy. I just could not throw out all those healthy looking plants. So, I nurtured the babies at the ends of the runners and eventually separated the babies from their mothers.”
This gave Drummond an abundance of new plants to start with. She decided these fungus-resistant plants were worth sharing. “I gave some of the babies to HCMGA to sell at their spring plant sale and kept 36 for myself.” After all that effort, Drummond states she was “very invested in saving these strawberry plants and seeing my experiment through. I didn’t want that one week of cold to mess up months of effort.”
Plants grown from seed saved year to year tend to improve their disease control and climate tolerance. It will be interesting to learn if Drummond’s strawberries also continue to improve their fungus-fighting abilities.
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