Will indoor-grown strawberries flower multiple times, if grown all year long?

Question

My parents have a great garden that they started a few years ago with a bed of strawberries and a few other things. My dad built a box to keep out rabbits, but soon enough the strawberries had outgrown the box and then they started out growing the confines of the garden. We figured it was a good enough reason to not mow those parts of the lawn, but now we have an ever increasing field of strawberries. As a very willing member of my family, (and a bit of a scientist) I have decided to take up growing some in my dorm room next year, so they'll be inside, under lamp light from the end of summer until the start of spring. (And in upstate New York, that might be a long time)

My main question is:

• Will my strawberry plants, taken from the runners of my family's well-established June-bearing strawberry plants (I'm not certain of a specific variety), flower and fruit over the winter?

• How often/recurrently will they flower?

• Is there anything I can do to have them flower more often?

• What if they were ever-bearing? How about day-neutral?

Answer 1

Not an expert on strawberries but my answer to the question in the title would be "no" and the reason for that is that plants have a growth cycle and strawberries, whether grown in New York or here in Virginia or down in Florida or in California all still follow a cycle. It's the same thing for flowers or any other plants.

What tends to differ in those different USDA hardiness zones is when the plants produce. Down in Florida they are early in the year - December through May, I believe - while here in VA we pick strawberries (and here I'm specifically talking about "June bearing" ones because those tend to be the kind that are grown at the PYO patches) in May and maybe into June but otherwise the plants are just spreading via runners and developing roots.

Ever-bearing ones will produce less berries over a longer period of time but I don't think that's really what you are asking. Even ever-bearing ones follow a cycle and don't flower year-round.

This is, in part, why you see berries in stores from the deep south in the late winter months here in VA, fresh ones in the late spring/early summer and some from north of us later in the summer and in the "off season" they are trucked in from far off places where the berries are currently growing.

Now, if these are new plants - first year planting of runners - you'll probably get a few berries but not like year two.