Matted Row vs. Hill System: Two Genuinely Different Ways to Grow the Same Crop
This isn't a spacing preference -- it's two different growing systems tied to two different types of strawberry plant. Colorado State University Extension ties the matted row system specifically to June-bearing varieties, which fruit once per season and are expected to spread by runners to fill the bed. The hill system is used for everbearing and day-neutral varieties instead.
Runner management is the actual mechanism that separates the two, not the spacing number itself. In a matted row, you deliberately let runners root and fill the row -- Colorado State says let it fill to 1-2 feet wide, University of Illinois says no wider than 2 feet -- and only remove runners that stray into the walkway. In a hill system, University of Illinois is explicit: "all runners are removed so that only the original mother plant is left to grow." Skipping that step on a day-neutral hill planting defeats the point of choosing that system, since those varieties are picked precisely because they don't need runners to keep producing fruiting crowns the way June-bearing types do.
Why Spacing (and System) Matters for Strawberries
Get the system wrong for your variety and you either waste bed space (planting a hill-system, non-spreading everbearing variety at wide matted-row spacing) or lose most of a season's runners to a losing battle against removing them (planting a June-bearing matted-row variety but treating it like a hill and pulling every runner).
For raised beds and small gardens specifically, University of Illinois and Colorado State University Extension both effectively point toward the hill system as the better fit -- it's designed not to need the extra room a matted row reserves for runner spread.
