First strawberries!

We picked three gallons of strawberries today - April 20th!
There are plenty more coming where these came from! Even with our cooling off weather we are still having early berries! Earlier this week we picked a half gallon, just enough to enjoy our first shortcake! Yum!

A wheelbarrow full of strawberries!

It's an understatement that we love berries! We have always tried to have a strawberry patch. Last year we had a banner year of 75 gallons of berries out of our patch. But after the season, we replanted four of our beds so I knew this year, we would not have as many berries. So far though, it's doing well. On Saturday I picked 5 gallons of berries.

Today, Michael helped me and we picked 8 gallons. We had to use the wheel barrow to get them up to the house! They are beautiful and taste wonderful. There is nothing like a fresh berry picked on site!

Strawberry fields forever!

We have been picking wonderful strawberries for the past three weeks. As of today, we have picked over 60 gallons of berries. They are almost over, but we should get a few for the next week or two. We have really enjoyed them with a wonderful sugar free strawberry pie, berries with yogurt, and berry smoothies and just plain berries. We have also shared a lot of them with others. I think I could eat them every day! We hope to at least have them every week as we've put about 42 quarts in the freezer.

Early April Garden progress

I thought I'd show an update of the garden coming to life! I think we are going to have a banner year for fruit. We didn't have a late frost (fingers crossed another week for sure) and everything looks great.


Here's our blackberries from lat year and they are loaded with buds.


Our strawberries are full of blooms and the plants look so healthy and huge, bigger than last year. We put some of the mushroom compost on them a couple of month's ago and they have taken off! My mouth is watering!


Here's a view of the garden from the strawberry plants and cane berries. We are adding some more cane berries this week. (I know we have to take time to finish mowing the lawn around the garden!)

Our fruit trees are full of fruit. Here's an apple tree in full bloom! It is so therapeutic to work in a garden and watch the cycles of life.

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.

Cleaning out the Strawberry raised beds

Boy, what a job I have ahead at the beginning of Spring! But, the lure of strawberries makes it worth it!



We actually added three more strawberry beds and three cane berry beds last fall. We heavily mulched things but I guess the winter was too much for it!



After working about an hour a day for five days, I think I beat the weeds!



See the blooms. . . I can already taste the strawberries! Now, we did have a full week of much needed rain so I'll have to be vigilent!