Hill System for Strawberries

Has anyone planted strawberries using the Hill System where the runner are cutoff and no new plants are produced. I read an article stating this method uses the plants energy to produce larger fruit in lieu of producing runners and "daughter plants". The article said that with this method the yield can remain high for up to six years in lieu of getting smaller as with the "matted " method of letting the runners make new plants. I'm planning this Spring to put 45 plants in a 4' X 16' bed, 12" between plants. Anyone have any knowledge or experience with this system?

I also read about this method, and I did give it a try. I dutifully started out trimming off all the runners that the plants produced, so they could focus on berries. The strawberries reacted by sending out yet more runners. I trimmed those off and they sent out yet more. It was a battle all summer long, and I finally grew tired of it and let them go.

There are some factors I was dealing with which affected my experience. I had a 4 foot by 30 foot bed, which was a fair amount of plants to take care of. Also, the strawberry variety I planted (Rainier) was a particularly robust and prolific plant. I have given away literally hundreds of baby plants in just one year.

I have another variety of strawberry (Tri-star) that does not pump out the runners at the same breakneck pace. I might try this method again using those.

Thanks for the information about the amount of time required to keep the runners trimmed . I had thought about using Chandler or Sweet Charlie but both of these are advertised as vigorous plants. I'm now looking at Allstar, Cardinal, or Earliglow. I'm a volunteer with our community's "helping the needy" garden. We are putting in strawberries as a cash crop to help with our expenses and will use the traditional "matted" method at the community site. I wanted to try the "hill" at home to compare the results.

The varieties you're growing are Junebearers, which tend to have more vigorous growth of runners. I think the hill method is more commonly used with everbearers or day neutral varieties. I put in a short row of these last year but still found myself having to snip off runners t hroughout the season. I didn't notice anything better about the berries.

I think you are right , LTilton, that day neutral berries might work better with this method.

As for the reason for doing it this way.....What I read was that the plant (using hill system) was supposed to bear over a longer period of years, before needing to be replaced to keep production at a good level. This was claimed to be because the plant wasn't expending energy in baby plant production. Might be true, but with the massive amount of babies my plants pumped out anyway (yes, they are June bearers), I had plenty of replacements constantly available.