2012 pictures of Birth of new strawberry bed through 1st renovation

Those are very well protected berries.

Here is a crazy observation--
My biggest ripened strawberries -at the moment- are coming from 2012 runners, not the fussed over table top plants!
These daughters were haphazardly placed into various boxes on the ground and are out performing my tabletop plants in plant size/vigor, leaf size, and current mature ripened berry size. The downside is the daughter's are only producing a mere couple of large fruit. In contrast the 4ft square table top is totally loaded with smaller plants with hundreds upon hundreds of young green berries and a couple of pink-reddish ones. I'm very curious to see the final production quality of the table top berries.

My question then is - has anyone else experienced differences between in-ground and table top strawberries?

I would like to add compost tea/worm tea to the table top during this vigorous berry production stage to assist with robust fruiting. Hope this is sound thinking....anyone?

My daughters in the ground boxes look robust just like yours.
Your parent plants are bigger than my tabletop parent plants. Just dragged my carcass inside from a brief garden visit. This ol' gal is ill today, pain meds and antibiotics not working quick enough..anyway
Hope tomorrow to get back outside briefly and take pictures of the smaller table top plants. I wonder if the the crammed plants in the tabletop is one issue plus enduring more cold stress and wind being raised a couple feet up is another issue? I dunno.

Update--
Forget the daughter plants! They got big leaves and just a couple fruit each. The past 13 days I picked between 450 and 500 berries off the tabletop with 64 plants and still going strong. Not too shabby for a first time strawberry attempt.

Argh! And I just lost three slightly larger but still tiny strawberries to the birds yesterday. I simply must go out and buy some bird netting.

Yes Donnainzone10 - save that fruit from the birds!
Kelejan- all sounds good!
Krisandbert- I ordered mine from Shumway online, they also answered questions by phone afterwards which was appreciated. Have you looked up your extension service either online or by phone to find out what variety grows best in your area? Could save you a few headaches later on.

Glad to help out a little

Nice       

Your Welcome Judy,
Honestly I don't know for sure how the plants will handle the move.  My limited experienced guess is they will be fine since they seem to be as tough as weeds and they go dormant in cold weather anyway.

I'm about to discover out how much abuse they can tolerate in a tabletop from the recent unusual arctic cold with sustained temps below zero.  Survival seems too much to ask of such little plants! The tabletop was covered in pine straw and leaves. If they live through this I'll be amazed and grateful.
Stay tuned.
 

I'm very interested to hear how other gardens over-wintered too. 

Besides the strawberry bed there are two more beds,  last spring's brand new asparagus bed, and the other bed was full of re-planted garlic.  I'm suppose to enjoy free garlic this year.  We'll see what nature has in store.

My entire table top of 64 strawberries that I shared so many pictures of their growth earlier in this thread, is totally dead. Brown. Lifeless.  I got a few words to say to Mother Nature and none of it could be said in church.  Lol. I am so glad I saved many runners and re planted those in beds on the ground.  I guess the lesson here is perennials do well in most any kind of brutal winter as long as its on the ground.   I thought the table top may have an exposure issue at some point, so yes it apparently did even though the bed was covered in pine straw and leaves.  Can't win them all and this was a sad loss but could be worse had I not saved runners.  All in all instead of 114 plants this year I am down to 50 on the ground, not a total loss.

CC
I look forward to a lot of runners with these too.  Last year I gave several dozen to my next door neighbor and he put his box on the ground so maybe I can get some in return. Either way this is not the end just a little set back. 

The ground must be the answer to insulating the plants I guess.  If anyone is reading this that has strawberries survive extreme cold in a table top, I'd love to hear your secret for survival. My pine straw and leaves wasn't enough. I think I pulled the leaves off early enough to prevent them from smothering, too.