Trellis Type For Climbing Strawberries
Answered by: Inge Poot
Question from: Sandy Milne
Posted on: May 27, 2007

We bought a number of climbing strawberries from Richters last year for our backyard garden.

Can you tell me more about the climbing needs/habits of these plants?

This year, my husband would like to put in a trellis to "help them climb".

Are they twiners like clematis, or have suckers like ivy (seems unlikely to me)? Will they "stick" to a trellis on their own, or will they need to be tied and looped throughout their growing season? Would cotton netting (e.g. Lee Valley Tools) be a good choice? How tall will they get? Might they stop at a meter, or are they 2 meters, or as much space as provided?

The plants are just very vigorous stolon-forming plants. Normally the stolons would "gallop" along the ground rooting as they form baby plantlets, but this habit also makes them perfect subjects for training the stolons upward so that they bear strawberries off the ground. You can either gently bend the stolons in and out of the mesh used as support and their rigidity will hold them up. Or you could tie them at intervals to the support and this way avoid the danger of over-bending the stems and having them die off on you. I should think that 2 to 3 foot high chicken wire stretched over a frame of wood would work very well. In the fall you could detach the frame from vertical posts driven into the ground to hold the frame up, and lay the frame plus stems down on the ground for the winter. A straw much would be very beneficial.

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