Even if I remove all weeds around my strawberries a month's growth has them smothered in grasses, clover and other weeds. Is there anything I can put down that will help, or do I just need to manually weed all the time?
(I want to eat the strawberries, so don't want to use weedkillers)
This might be an application for "landscape fabric"? Also known as "weed fabric", the big box sellers in the US have it. When preparing your bed, you put this fabric down, and perhaps cover it with mulch to make it look better. Then cut a hole in the fabric for each strawberry plant. The weeds are blocked by the fabric, and the strawberries grow through their holes - or that is the idea.
I find that putting down some sort of mulch will help with keeping weeds down and water in.
You can certainly buy mulch, but if you happen to have leaves or grasses you recently trimmed (really, anything that is not going to try to grow on you! So no roots, and no succulents), you can put them down around your strawberries. This tends to be easier, in my experience, with recently cut leaves and grasses, simply because they are still pliable. If, however, you have dried out stuff, you can just be sure to layer it more carefully. The only real problem with using this kind of mulch is that it will biodegrade more quickly.
When you have runners, you can always move aside your mulch to allow the runners to root.
I put an ok kids swimming pool around my strawberries this year. It had the twofold purpose of keeping stawberries in and keeping weeds out. The pool has it's bottom cut out so its just a big 12inch border for the berries. The plants grew so tall so quick that I have barely had to pull any weeds.
However, I do have a lot of weird misshapen fruit and if a berry starts to mold it turns a putrid fuzzy grey. (the first one I found I thought was a dead mouse. I'd imagine this has a lot to do with the pool trapping moisture and not letting air get to the soil much. Probably cloud have corrected the situation with straw mulch when the flowers started to appear, but I still got plenty of berries for the space it takes.
I use a plastic cover over my strawberries with the plants growing through small openings in the plastic. You can put some mulch over the top of the plastic to hid it from view. Traditionally, straw in used to mulch around strawberries and the straw itself prevents many of the weeds. All that said, in summer, weeding is a weekly activity not monthly. A small time spent often is better than a long time spent occasionally.
