Strawberry plants

BY MOVING your strawberry plants undercover you can get them to crop a few weeks early. If you move your plant into a heated greenhouse or put them on a southwest facing windowsill your plants can crop up to three months earlier. Start by either, lifting plants from the soil and potting them up into 6in (15cm) pots of multipurpose compost, or move pot-grown plants under cover. If a lot of roots are thrusting out of the bottom of the pots, pot them on into one size large pot with fresh compost. If you don't pot on your plants, give them a feed with liquid, balanced fertiliser such as MiracleGro. If you don't have any strawberry plants ; go and buy some now! Once the plants are in the greenhouse or house keep them quite cool ; about 5ºC (41ºF) until you can see signs of growth ; this takes about two weeks. Once growth starts increase the room temperature to about 10ºC (50ºF). Make sure the compost isn't allowed to dry out, but at the same time doesn't get waterlogged. Once flowers have set you will need to increase the room temperature to about 18ºC (65ºF) and also hand pollinate them. This is because many beneficial insects haven't woken up yet, and the ones that have probably won't be able to get to the flowers. Using a make-up brush, cotton wool bud or your pinky, gently rub the inside of the flowers. Move from one flower to another in order to spread each flower's pollen about. At this point a further liquid high-potash (tomato) feed would be beneficial. Keep the compost well watered until fruits start to ripen. ;