At the end of the season, there are a few things you can do with your strawberry plants to ensure they are healthy and ready for the next growing season. Here are some tips from the search results:

1. Winterize your strawberry plants: Protect your strawberry plants from ground frost by adding a layer of mulch around the base of the plants after they have entered dormancy. This mulch will also help retain moisture as while they do not like waterlogged soils, strawberry plants to like to be kept moist.

2. Renovate your strawberry plants: Renovation is the process of restoring the health of the plants after harvest and preparing them for the following season. This step only applies to mature stands of June-bearing strawberries. The tasks to achieve these goals include weed management, mowing the plants, fertilizer application, cultivation, and irrigation. Renovation should start immediately after the end of harvest.

3. Trim away old foliage: In late summer or autumn, when the plants have finished fruiting, it is a good idea to trim away all of the old foliage. Cut it right away to near the crown, taking care not to ‘pull’ at the plant to remove the growth, as this might loosen the plant in the soil. Strawberries are quite shallow rooted and sometimes it doesn’t take much to dislodge them.

4. Protect your strawberry plants from winter: Protect your strawberry plants from winter’s cold temperatures by heaping a loose mulch over plants to a depth of 3 to 5 inches. Use a material that won’t compact heavily. Good choices include straw, clean hay, bark chips, chopped cornstalks or cobs, evergreen branches, or pine straw. Materials like leaves or grass clippings aren’t a good choice because they tend to mat. After mulch settles, it should still provide a 2- to 3-inch depth for best protection.

5. Deal with strawberry runners: As your strawberries grow and mature, they will start to produce new baby plants on the ends of long runners. If left, these new plants will root into the soil and make new ones. Allowing reproduction to occur untended will result in a congested and unruly strawberry patch! It’s best to direct the new runners into any spare spaces or gaps in the rows where they can grow and fill these spaces in.