While most of the strawberry growing community is nestled around the warm fire roasting chestnuts, drinking hot toddies and reflecting on the past year, I've been managing a fairly large amount of communication concerning plant dieback which is almost certainly attributed to high nitrate accumulation from pre-plant fertilizers. Those queries which are accompanied by soil analyses say as much with EC's above four, and nitrates well above the 40 ppm what I would see to be of concern, with one sample even setting my heart racing with a stratospheric print of 220 ppm.

This has been discussed pretty thoroughly in this space before, so I simply provide the links here:

http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=6538

and a closer analysis of the issue, including soil samples, here:

http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=6608

We are not looking at getting much benefit from rain for a while, so it's time to run the overhead sprinklers to leach all of this stuff out if high nitrates are the issue in a plant dieback scenario.