With Wimbledon fast approaching, I've been in the strawberry patch, giving it a final weeding and making sure that slugs hiding under leaves in the soil are not ready to eat them, as they did last year!

The best thing to counter slugs is dryness, they sit at the edge of the strawberries in longer grass, then come out when it rains or once the fruit starts to appear.

Clearing any weeds away and cutting down the grass at the edges will get rid of the slug cover, drying them out in the open. A few well placed slug pellets should do the trick to catch the young ones and protect around the edges.
As you can tell, I was pretty annoyed last year to see a mass of big, red, juicy strawberries, but when it came to picking them, most had been eaten from underneath by slugs.

With the dry weather this year, I have kept the patch watered, as many of this year's plants are "new" baby plants, grown from the shoots of last years older plants. I am told that after three years the older plants start to leave smaller fruit and in less quantity, so when the shoots came off last year, I lifted a few of the six original plants I put in and made sure the shoots were spread out.
It sounds like a lot of work, but it really wasn't, just make sure the new shoots are in the soil, let them spread then cut the stems where they join the new plant.

Not bad going for six old strawberry cuttings I picked up from Dad's allotment, I now have more than 30 strawberry plants!