I was thinking of growing some this year in hanging pots just to keep the slugs off them!

I heard a talk and on strawberries, the idea is that CA growers use clear plastic and fumigation to kill everything in the soil to get those big berries. They have to do it every year before planting. Organic growers don't use super toxic fumigation and instead use black plastic and the suns heat. Then the rows are covered with a straw sometimes. They get that first early crop by getting prechilled plants and planting those out. Our home un chilled plants wont give that big early crop. Strawberries like lots of sand in the soil. The best strawberry fields are riverbed soils and the plants sit high on sandy rows and the channels between are flooded or tubing runs under the plastic.

This same guy said try an experiment. Grow one plant on the best potting mix you can get and another in pure sand. Water the one in sand every day, maybe twice a day and feed a few times a month. The one in sand will be twice as big and setting berries sooner. I am going to try this. My granddad grew great strawberries in Downy. They had great sandy loam at that house. Disneyland area is on sandy riverbed soil and there were strawberry fields all along Harbor Bl. once upon a time. The coastal areas still grow strawberries because (the cool summer conditions keep the plants fruiting longer?) It had something to do with temperature as I recall from the talk. Maybe your Michigan friend has those cool temps in conjunction with more and higher angle sun late spring-summer. He also gets chilling strawberries like in fall and winter that we don't get.

Perhaps the rot is something they fumigate for or else maybe try adding an organic fertilizer in case any mineral is missing and causing this rot. I think strawberries do better in the ground where they can grow those big roots. When I try them in pots, the berries are small and in a few months, the potting soil breaks down and the plants get stunted as the soil loses oxygen.

wow, I have seen those plastic sheets and been told it is for fumigation in the farms in Salinas. I am wondering if I buy a plant at the store if it has been prechilled. I suspect not!

Fumigation with methyl bromide was outlawed several years ago, and 2016 was the last year it could be used on strawberry fields. Strawberry growers had a 10 year extension to continue using it, so its use on other crops stopped 10 years ago. The plants you buy in the store are not actually in soil, but potting mix.

Strawberry fumigation