Gardening tips for August: Plant strawberries

The forward-thinking strawberry grower will have taken the opportunity to select runners from a row of plants to peg down as new plants for the future. Now is the time to turn your investment into capital. Cultivate a piece of open ground, working in a dressing of fish, blood and bone, consolidate the earth and set a tight line. With a trowel, line the young plants out 1ft apart. They are fiddly plants to weed, so one option is to spread a landscape fabric over the soil after cultivation, then cut crosses through at intervals and plant into them.

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