could you be a bit more specific on where you are ... z6 is pretty diverse.. winter wise ...

i found.. in my z5 MI ... strawberries are rather short lived .. in mother earth ... and that is why.. they sell them in bundles of 25 every spring at the nursery ... yes.. with much patience and work ... you can make them live longer ... if you fool around with the runners ... in essence.. every year.. you are replacing the old.. with the new ones on the runners ...

all said... individual plants are short lived ...

what options do you have for winter storage ....

regardless of what you find out... give it a try.. it will be fun to find out.. if you can beat the odds ...

never forget.. the most important thing in a pot.. of any kind.. is the media you use.. so you can perfect watering ...

and that water management continues thru winter ...

ken

i started wondering.. if a given S plant is perennial or annual ... sorta like raspberry canes ... wherein the roots are perennial ... but the individual canes are almost annual ...

so i did the search below ... and found out.. go figure.. there are two kinds.. and you need to make sure you start with the right kind ...

ken

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=is+strawberry+annual+or+perennial&t=ffsb&ia=web

When we grew strawberries in big pots (not a vertical system...), we used the runners to plant up new pots in August. We stored the pots in the garage for the winter. The plants in the original ‘mother’ pot would last two years before significant decline, but decline they always did! We stopped bothering with the pot system a few years ago now. Now we just have some of the runnerless/clumping European wild types that produce the small berries (the birds get most of them!) They seed around a bit but not aggressively and are ornamental living in the beds in the front garden. There are a few of the ordinary large-fruited type where runners escaped the pots and rooted in beds. They don’t fruit much and aren’t much of a problem in the beds so we just leave them alone. I’d guess that in a couple of years, your proposed fancy growing system would not be worth the effort in terms of fruit produced :-). But it should be a fun experiment in the first few years....

Hi all, and thanks for the feedback.

We are in Mass zone-6b

We'll give the strawberries a try again in a different planting method this time and see how things work out. No problem I guess if we replant each year. I wonder how difficult it is to start seedlings yourself and then transplant them out. We'll see how things work out.

Thanks,