NEW STRAWBERRY BEDS

When we did our grading for our raised beds and the greenhouse, we had such a change in elevation that we put in a retaining wall. Michael had the wonderful idea of putting in a narrow raised bed and strawberries in it. That way, we can stand up and pick the berries! Since fall is the time to plant the berries, we stopped work on the greenhouse to build our raised beds.

We found a wonderful place to get mushroom compost to use along with some peat moss and vermiculite to make the soil. I love this stuff and plan to compost raised beds when we put them to bed for the winter.

Michael used his geometry to figure out how much from each bag of vermiculite and peat moss we needed to mix the soil. My job was to bring the buckets of mushroom compost from the truck to the wheelbarrow where Michael would mix it all.

I placed newspaper as a barrier to the ground to smother any grass. Here's the mix as we put it into the beds.

We used two wheelbarrow fulls of mixture for each bed and then we mixed up two other batches to make sure they were all full.

After I wet down the beds, I went and got some strawberry runners to transplant.

Now I have to finish cleaning out the rest of the strawberry beds. They are really prolific and it's a lot of work to clean them out.

Thank goodness the soil is very loose so I can pull them up pretty easy. It's hard to take all of these beautiful plants to the compost pile! I have given away some plants to anyone that wanted them.