October 26, 2026

How to care for strawberry plants in winter

Caring for strawberry plants in winter takes four jobs. Tidy the bed in fall, water deeply before the ground freezes, cover the plants with straw after a few hard freezes, and pull the straw back when new leaves start growing under it. Time each job by the lows in your own yard. The plants respond to temperature and day length, and they ignore the calendar.

Strawberries are evergreen perennials. The crown, the short stem at soil level, holds the buds for next spring's flowers. Winter damage happens when cold air reaches the crown or when freezing and thawing soil tears the roots. Every step below protects the crown. Our own strawberries went into raised bed 4 as transplants on May 10, 2026, so this is the routine we're following this winter.

Step 1. Tidy the bed without cutting it back

Remove dead and spotted leaves, pull weeds, and snip runners you don't want rooting. Leave the healthy green leaves on. They keep making sugars on mild days, and those sugars feed the crown through winter. The leaves also sit between the crown and the cold air. June-bearing plants get cut back during renovation right after harvest, so there is no fall mowing to do.

Step 2. Set your yard's frost offset

Forecast lows describe an area, and your bed can run colder. On still, clear nights, heavy cold air slides downhill and collects wherever the ground dips. In our garden, the station reads 7°F below the forecast low. A forecast that looks safe can be a freeze in our beds.

Every garden on Siltwell gets frost alerts. To set a manual offset, open Settings and go to Garden, then Edit garden. The alerts and planning frost dates shift to match it. To get a starting number, try the microclimate checker, which lines up the last few nights of forecasts against readings from home stations nearby and returns an area-level figure. A connected station replaces the manual number with a learned one after about 14 days of overlapping readings.

Step 3. Water deeply before the ground freezes

Strawberry leaves keep losing water on sunny, windy winter days. Once the soil freezes, roots can't pull water up to replace it, and the leaves and crown dry out. Wet ground also banks more daytime heat than dry ground, then releases it gradually after dark. Water on a day above freezing, early enough that it soaks in before dark. Our guide on watering before a freeze covers which nights to target. In a dry fall, Siltwell's dry-spell alert flags stretches with under 5 mm of rain forecast over the next 6 days.

Step 4. Mulch after several hard freezes

Strawberry plants harden off as days shorten and nights cool. Sugars build up in the crown, and the cells tolerate more cold. Mulching too early traps warmth and moisture, which slows hardening and invites crown rot. Wait until the plants have taken a few hard freezes and the leaves lie flat and turn red or bronze. Our beds saw their first fall frost last year on October 3, a full 19 days ahead of the published date. A first light frost like that comes too early for mulch, because the plants are still hardening.

Cover the plants with loose, clean straw, deep enough that the leaves disappear. Wheat or oat straw traps air and stays fluffy. Hay carries seeds that sprout into weeds in spring. Shredded leaves mat down when wet and can smother the crowns.

Step 5. Check the bed during thaws

Wind lifts straw off the bed, and thaws expose the soil. Soil expands each time it freezes, and repeated freeze and thaw cycles push crowns up out of the ground and snap roots. Gardeners call this heaving. After a thaw, walk the bed. Press heaved crowns back into the soil and replace any straw that has blown away.

Step 6. Pull the straw back when growth starts

In spring, lift a handful of straw and look at the leaves underneath. When new leaves are growing and turning pale yellow-green, the plants need light. Rake the straw off the plants and into the aisles, where it keeps berries off the soil later. Straw left on too long causes weak, pale growth and rot.

Keep the straw close, because open blossoms are the most frost-tender part of the plant. Siltwell checks the forecast at 5 p.m. local time each day for tomorrow and the day after, so a frost alert gives you an evening to throw straw or frost cloth back over the bed. This year our last recorded frost came on April 30, past the published April 28 date. With our offset applied, Siltwell puts our last frost at May 20. Read why your last frost date is probably wrong, and see how much cold blossoms and crowns can take.

What can go wrong

• Mulching too early. Warm, wet straw over active plants delays hardening and rots crowns.
• Mulching too late. Bare crowns take the coldest nights unprotected, and bare soil heaves.
• Raised beds freezing harder. A raised bed loses heat through its sides as well as its top, so its soil freezes deeper. Our coldest night of 2026 was 3°F, and our strawberries sit in a raised bed, so that bed gets the most straw.
• Dry soil after uncovering. April 2026 brought 0.54 inches of rain in our garden, the driest month of the year so far. Plants push leaves and flowers fast once uncovered, so check moisture after the straw comes off.
• Uncovering too late. Leaves grown in the dark under straw come out pale and soft, and they scorch or rot when exposed.

A frost alert reads the air near your weather source. It can't tell you the temperature at the crown under the straw, and we have no probe reading there to say how much warmer it runs.

If you're unsure your plants will make it through at all, read whether strawberry plants survive winter at your real low before you mulch. Then enter your offset before the first hard freeze, so the alerts that mark your mulching nights arrive on the right evenings.