The crop year, month by month

Decide the area and the cultivar, then book the runners.

• Fix how much you are planting and which cultivar it will be — the two decisions everything downstream depends on
• Book planting material now. Nurseries allocate their best material to repeat buyers first, and growers who ring in August get what is left
• If you are planting more than an acre, split the order across two nurseries so one bad batch cannot take the whole season

Price the inputs while you still have leverage.

• Get written quotations for runners, mulch film, drip and punnets rather than working from last year's numbers
• At 22,000 plants to the acre, every rupee on the plant price moves the budget by ₹22,000 — this is the line worth negotiating hardest
• Plan rotation. Ground carrying a history of wilt or red stele is a decision to make now, not in November

Fix the drainage. It is the highest-return job of the year.

• Drainage work while the rain is showing you exactly where water sits
• Phytophthora crown rot and red stele are water-driven diseases before they are anything else, and no spray compensates for a wet site
• Order packaging and confirm cold-chain arrangements before everyone else does

Beds, organic matter, drip. Confirm the delivery date.

• Land preparation and bed forming — raised beds, so the ground sheds water rather than holding it
• Farmyard manure and basal dressing incorporated
• Drip laid and tested before the film goes down, not after
• Confirm the runner delivery window with the nursery and hold them to it

The planting fortnight starts. This is the decision you cannot undo.

• NHB gives the window for hilly areas as September–October; in practice growers here work to a narrower band inside it
• Inspect every delivery before you accept it: crowns 8–12 mm, roots white to cream and springy, two to three healthy leaves
• Turn ten plants over and check leaf undersides with a hand lens. Importing mite with your planting material is the most expensive avoidable mistake in the crop
• Plant early into warm soil and you get leaf instead of flower; plant late and the plant flowers on a frame too small to carry fruit. Neither is recoverable

Get them rooted, and start looking at leaf undersides.

• Complete transplanting; establishment irrigation without overwatering
• Begin scouting properly — undersides of leaves, with a lens, not a glance at the canopy
• Decide your runner policy for the season: runners left on the plant compete with fruit, but they are also free planting material for next year

First fruit, best prices — and the bloom that decides your fruit rot.

• First picks begin. Grade discipline starts here and sets your realisation for the whole season
• Target grey mould at bloom rather than reacting to rot on fruit later. The infection happens at flowering and stays latent
• Field-grade into the punnet the fruit will ship in; never tip out and re-sort
• Cool fruit quickly after picking — the difference between five days of shelf life and two

Volume arrives. Picking becomes a labour problem.

• Picking every second day at peak, by hand, by people who need training — plan this before you plant, not now
• Mite counts matter more than mite sightings: published guidance works to fewer than five per mid-tier leaflet early in the crop
• Keep the cold chain honest. Fruit that goes to market warm loses a grade in transit

Highest volume, lowest prices, and everything depends on labour.

• Peak picking. Fruit left on the plant because you were short of hands is the most common avoidable loss of the season
• Scout leaf undersides for powdery mildew — by the time the top surface tells you, it is well established
• Mite thresholds rise later in the crop as plants tolerate more; published guidance allows 15–20 per mid-tier leaflet

Warmer weather brings anthracnose forward.

• Anthracnose becomes the fruit rot to watch as temperatures rise; grey mould was the bloom-time problem, this is the warm-weather one
• Remove infected fruit from the field rather than dropping it between beds — it is inoculum for the next round
• Start assessing which plants you would multiply from, if you are propagating your own

Last fruit, and prices climb back.

• Final picks. The belt is finishing and the fruit still coming is worth more than January's
• Decide now whether next season's planting material is bought or multiplied — and if multiplied, from which plants
• Virus load accumulates across self-propagated generations. Refresh from certified stock every second season at minimum

Write down what actually happened.

• Crop removal, or runner multiplication if you are propagating
• Record the numbers while they are fresh: actual yield, actual grade split, what the disease pressure was and when
• That record is what makes next year's budget real rather than a repeat of a published model