The strawberry plant reproduces by the endlessly fascinating method of runners, reaching across the soil and taking root on contact. The gardener wishes to regulate this territorial expansion by confining the plants to manageable rows, and achieves this by pegging down the most promising runners into pots of compost and removing the rest. Now that these plantlets have established themselves,
they can be detached and transplanted into their final positions, 18in apart, in soil buffed up with fish, blood and bone.
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