My Southern California Vegetable Garden: Pruning Strawberry Plants

Now that Summer's over, it is time to prune the Albion Strawberry plants growing in my Strawberry Tower.

After almost 2 months of intense heat (with temperatures approaching 100 degrees), the temperatures have dropped dramatically. The plants are producing more Strawberries and Strawberry flowers with the drop in temperature.

Albion Strawberry plants are of the day neutral variety, so they are very temperature sensitive. They will not flower if it gets too hot (above 85 degrees).

Unfortunately, it is getting very hard to see the ripe strawberries with all of the strawberry leaves in the Strawberry Tower (see picture to the right). I have had to throw several Strawberries out because they were too ripe by the time I noticed them.

Many of the Strawberry leaves are very old and the branches are turning woody. You can see many of the leaves are turning or have turned brown in the picture. These old leaves also block the sun from reaching the new leaves that are starting to grow from the Strawberry plants.

I grabbed my pruning shears and starting cutting away at all of the dead and old leaves. The picture to the right shows some of the leaves that I cut away.