I know this sounds hilarious, but you have to understand … I have been known to drive around with these puppies and my gardening gloves in my car — you know, in case something needs a good trim? The biggest problem when I can’t find something I need is that I find other things to do. And look! I have a nice pair of loppers in my garage!

So … you get the picture. Poor Japanese Maple, your one branch was just a little too close to my head and it shaded the south edge of my garden just a few minutes too many. Half of the two-trunked Oregon Ash got it with a saw too. I guess the pine is lucky I finally found the pruners, because some blackberries pushing their boundary line got it instead of a third tree.

Clicking on any of the above images gets you a larger view.

One of the three wine barrel planters in the second row of this picture is not getting enough sun. You be the judge of which barrel of peas is suffering a bit. Click on the image for a larger view.

I did move it into this position for the picture, and so that the one could get more sun. We’ll see if it helps.

When I went strawberry picking at a local farm last year, I noticed that a lot of the berries and leaves had gotten moldy under the plant. This was not a problem for me when my strawberries were in wine barrels, but now that they had moved into a more permanent home in the new beds it seemed like it would be more of a problem. The key to avoiding this is to create air under the plant by removing any low-lying leaves (anything that is basically laying in the dirt), any buds touching the ground, and any part of the plant that looks damaged or yellowing. Also, be sure to remove anything foreign, like twigs, tree leaves and weeds.

As you can see from the pictures, looking underneath the plants will give you everything from dead leaves to sneaky weeds. And yes, that is some curly parsley thrown in there. Click on the thumbnails to see larger images.

With the rains came heavy winds, and with heavy winds came damage to some tender plants. The tall/skinny things seem to take the worst of it — the iris and the pea shoots. I had to go out there yesterday and clean up the damaged parts because in a garden, damage invites diseases and pests.

Click on any thumbnail to get a gallery of larger images.

We actually have four colors of Iris this year that I did not see last year. The things that come up here continue to amaze me! Some people might find the randomness to be annoying, as we didn’t plant any of this stuff so we don’t really know what is going to come up. I just find it to be a fantastic adventure.

Please click on any image to launch the gallery.

Although the past few months have been unusually warm, we have had a few days of cold mixed in there. The danger in this is that the buds and new growth, which are more susceptible to cold damage, are out and exposed. To prevent this I ran out there with frost blankets, which say that they protect down to 29° in a single layer and 26° in a double layer. If you don’t have frost blankets handy, you can probably just grab some old sheets or any other thin material. The nice thing about the frost blankets is that they are reusable and breathable, so I don’t have to worry about suffocating the plants if I don’t pull them off early enough the next day.

After winter was over, I checked on my strawberries and saw these cute little overwintered plants, like so:

I thought, hey, no problem, I’ll just dig them out and put them in the new cedar beds — right? Well, I was wrong. Those cute tiny plants had taken over most of the wine barrel with their roots, so they all had rootballs about 2-3x the size of the plant:

Some even had roots that went all the way to the very bottom of the planter:

The trick to removing the plants from their current location was to dig around them, lifting up all the plants in a huge dirt clod, and then gentle teasing each plant and its rootball out. Established, winter-dormant plants don’t need all of their roots, but getting as much as you can doesn’t hurt. While removing the plants from their previous location, you might as well prune them at the same time by carefully plucking any unhealthy leaves or old stems from the crown of the plant.

Replanting the strawberries is not difficult, but you do need to exercise some care in your placement. Strawberries like to be buried with the crown of the plant just above the soil surface — too deep and you bury the crown, too shallow and the roots are exposed to the elements. Once you have found your perfect planting depth, hold the plant at the right height with one hand while lightly filling in around the hole with the other.

Once your plant is placed, give it a slight hill around the roots to keep water off the crown and feeding directly into the roots.

Other posts in this series: The Nearly-Spring 2010 Update on Strawberries, Building the Strawberry Beds

Nikole Gipps is a detail-oriented web developer, mud-loving Cornell Aggie, avid gardener, occasional iron chef, patient wife and fun mom of two. You can follow her work at That PHP Girl or see all of her feeds at NikoleGipps.com.

It might be a little late but …

The 2010 Spring Propagation Fair will be held March 13, 2010 at LCC Cafeteria, 10 am to 4 pm. This event is a free exchange of vegetable seed and fruit-tree cuttings, called "scions." Grafting help (free) and rootstock (for a small charge) will be available. There will also be workshops. If you can, bring your own seeds, plants, or fruit cuttings to share. Sponsoring organizations include the Eugene Permaculture Guild, the Seed Ambassadors Project, the National Clonal Germplasm Repository and Food Not Lawns.

After spending last season and the winter in wine barrel planters, I wanted my strawberries to have a more permanent home with the ability to spread more. I wanted the area to be large and deep, existing on top of the clay soil and not digging into it, so I decided to build a raised strawberry bed out of cedar. (Most prefab cedar garden beds around here are less than 12″ tall and use double digging into the existing soil, but I wanted to build completely on top for drainage purposes.) I headed to Home Depot for 5/4″ x 4″ 12FT planks of untreated cedar decking. (Do not get treated wood — it can leach chemicals into your fruit!) They were nice enough to cut it all up for me, leaving me with 20 6′ planks and 12 2′ pieces. I also picked up one box of wood screws with an included drill bit to assemble the whole thing.

A quick disclaimer: I am not one of those people who worries about everything being perfectly level or matching some other part of the yard. I am more about functionality than perfect design, so keep that in mind if you are looking for some sort of garden perfection here. You’ll have to level and excavate everything to make it even, and use your own saw to get all the pieces exactly the same, if that is what is important to you.

As my backyard is on a bit of an incline, I needed the cross posts to extend into the ground to prevent the whole thing from sliding. (I actually think the incline is a good thing, as it will allow the berry patch more drainage in heavy rain months, keeping the plants safe from standing water and rot.) I dug four holes at the four corners of where the bed was going, and four holes at midpoints of the side panels. The perpendicular support bars were fixed slightly below the top of the bed and then extended into the ground, into the holes, roughly 5″ down from the bottom board. The left and right panels were easy — I arranged 5 6-foot board on the ground with and attached a support bar on both sides and the middle while my 4-year-old handed me screws. Once assembled, I stood those sides up using their holes. After that point, it got a bit tricky. I found the easiest way to assemble the back and front panels was to first attach all the slats to the center support piece, and then stand them up in their center holes and attach the sides to the existing standing panels. This part does take a bit of force though, as the wood is not always square and sometimes you will find yourself bending board to make them attach. This is what the cedar bed looked like with 3 sides up:

Once I had all the sides up, pushed the hard clay soil back into the holes to keep the whole thing in place. (Who needs concrete when you have clay?) To suppress the grass underneath and add some organic matter, I put down a thick layer of rotting straw from the garden beds that I am breaking down from last year, like so:

Any mulch could work though — compost, clean leaves, a new bale of straw, etc. After the straw came the soil — rich planting soil, nice and black, from Rexius. Roughly a yard of soil was enough to fill this 6′ x 6′, 20″ deep box. I luckily had my helpers to help me smooth out every wheelbarrow load as well:

To prepare the soil for planting, I added in EB Stone Organics Tomato & Vegetable Food (4-5-3) as well as a few bags of Rexius chicken compost, and used a hard rake to work it into the first few inches of the topsoil. Here is the finished but unplanted raised cedar bed:

In the beds, I planted a few broccoli and cauliflower starts along with my strawberries, as the vegetable starts needed a place to go until the main garden bed is ready. My overwintered parsley was also tucked in here to keep it safe for another month or so, while the main bed is being broken down.

If building a huge garden bed is not your thing, don’t worry — strawberries will grow anywhere. If you have nice soil, you can grow them as groundcover in your yard. If you live in an apartment, you can grow them in a strawberry pot or Topsy Turvy hanging container. If you are limited on space in a yard, try a strawberry tower!

Other posts in this series: The Nearly-Spring 2010 Update on Strawberries

Nikole Gipps is a detail-oriented web developer, mud-loving Cornell Aggie, avid gardener, occasional iron chef, patient wife and fun mom of two. You can follow her work at That PHP Girl or see all of her feeds at NikoleGipps.com.

Is there anything more summer-y than fresh June-bearing strawberries?

These were my strawberries at the start of the 2009 season. I had purchased 4 varietes — a mix of June-bearing and ever-bearing varieties — in bare-root bunches and planted them in a wine barrel garden. They grew, produced their delicious crop, and then sent out runners which I tacked down with wires to produce more plants for next year. (I am picky though — only the best producers of my favorite varieties got to keep their runners!)

For the winter, I mulched them with a thick coat of fallen leaves from the Japanese Maple tree, which helped them survive the deep Alaskan freeze we got hit with in December of 2009.

In the spring, I decided that the strawberries needed a larger place to grow and spread out, and that is when the Raised Cedar Beds Strawberry Patch project was started. So get ready for spring and build your own strawberry patch along with me! I’ll be posting more about the details in a series of posts to come.

Other posts in this series: Building the Strawberry Beds

Nikole Gipps is a detail-oriented web developer, mud-loving Cornell Aggie, avid gardener, occasional iron chef, patient wife and fun mom of two. You can follow her work at That PHP Girl or see all of her feeds at NikoleGipps.com.