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.

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.

(The blueberry bush is the red sticks in the middle of this picture, if you can even see it.) What it turned out to be, as spring kept going, was a mess of boggish wet clay, daylillies, and blackberry vines. This area is at the bottom of my backyard, which apparently could be considered riparian because it is where all the rainwater goes — as it turns out, my back fence runs on top of an underground river and a stormwater drainage system. It’s good for things like blackberry vines and ash trees, but not so much for blueberry bushes. Oops! I clipped the berries off the plant that first year as instructed, but I knew they would have to be moved during the dormant season if they were going to ever have a chance.

Fast forward to late January 2010 … I thought I had plenty of time and suddenly spring was here! Two of the blueberry plants were already starting to bud so they had to be moved quickly. I started out by selecting a sunnier spot up the incline a bit. (I am more aware of sun patterns in the yard now, having been here for a year.) I dug four holes in the clay soil about 18 inches in diameter and about 18-24 inches deep.

I had 3 bushes that were located in the bog, and 1 that had been placed into a wine barrel planter. I removed the 3 in the bog, digging them out about 8-10 inches away from their base and scooping under them with the shovel. When it came time to grab the one bush in the planter, it became obvious why it was a good idea to move them — the one in the planter, from being in better soil and getting better light, had a rootball about 2x the size of the rootball on the other bushes even though I bought it later and planted it later.

Once I had all the bushes, I added them to their holes. I didn’t want to put the same soil back in the hole because it was full of clay and rocks, so I put a nice mixture of chicken compost, peat and planting soil — with a sprinkle of acid mix fertilizer which is made for blueberries — on the sides and underneath the existing rootball. So far they seem to be doing okay, although only 2 out of 4 are budding at this point. Time will tell how they survived the move as well as the deep freeze we had this past December. I’m not sure if I will clip the blueberry buds off the plants again this year. Technically they are much older than a plant you clip the berry buds off on, but I will have to see how healthy they look when it comes time to flower and make the call then.

Major points to remember:

• If you are going to move a blueberry bush, do it in the dormant season (around December and January).
• The diameter of the rootball is about half the size of the plant in bushes this size.
• Unless there is some sort of problem with the roots, just leave the rootball intact instead of trying to tease the mud out of the roots — especially in clay. Trying to remove the wet clay would just damage all the roots.
• Make the new hole about twice the size of the existing rootball.
• Fill the new hole with some nice planting soil, compost, and fertilizer. The air holes in the "new soil" will allow the roots to rapidly grow into their new home.
• Make the hole deeper than the rootball, but then fill the bottom with the soil mix to bring up the top of the rootball even to the topsoil surface level. This gives some extra drainage room in the bottom because your new hole will tend to suck in more water than the surrounding area.
• Unless you live in a mild climate, use some leaves or compost to mulch around the top of your plant and keep the roots safe from frost.

I am surprised that I managed to not get a good picture of the bushes in their final placement, but then again they are mostly sticks right now so it would be hard to tell. I will see if I can get a good picture of it tomorrow.

Rather than putting in a standard fence with boards and pressure-treated wood, I wanted something more natural and rugged looking. I found a great local connection for split cedar posts and rails off Craigslist, and picked up a whole pile of them. (I figured any extras could be used for other landscaping projects.)

The posts went in yesterday, which you can see from the picture below. They are being installed by an excellent local contractor here in Eugene, Russ Kimball, who doesn’t think I’m totally insane for installing a field fence in a small area of my backyard. Once the posts set, he will be attaching rails to the front of the fence and wire deer fencing to the back of the fence. I wanted it this way because the posts will make an attractive backdrop for the Clematis vines I purchased, which will be growing on cherrywood trellises that I am assembling soon. I also wanted the wire on the back in case I ever wanted to remove it some day, or change it out for a finer mesh in case my husband ever caves and lets me get chickens or ducks.

If you rewind a week or so, you’ll remember that I had removed the deck on my side yard. When the deck was pulled up, it became pretty clear that the deck had been sitting in a considerable amount of water from how rotten it was underneath. Once the deck was removed, and another rain storm hit, I could see that water and oh boy, was it shocking. I opened up my french doors to stare at roughly a foot of water in an area bigger than a plastic kiddie pool.

My task today was just to drop the water level down a bit, because I was actually worried about all this water creating a rotting situation underneath my house. So I made the hole bigger, just taking a shovel and removing enough clay mud to drop the water level down along the house. I also carved out a lot of the mud between the tree roots, taking a few of the roots with me. This is by no means a solution, just a short term fix—something to buy myself some time until Russ Kimball the contractor comes by in the morning to discuss some solutions with me.

I obviously have a lot more work ahead of me in regards to the patio project … I have been studying rain gardens and drainage systems (both natural and artificial) all afternoon. Hopefully Russ has some solutions that we can work on once I have bounced all this information and my ideas off him. (He definitely seems like the kind of guy that gets creative about a problem, and also seems to be interested in exploring more ecologically conscious solutions with me.) Even though I am exhausted right now from all that shoveling, I am very grateful for the rain storm of the past few days because otherwise I wouldn’t have seen how the rain interacts with the system in order to make something better out of it. Better to have more information now, for more informed planning, than to put together something that has to be redone in the next rainstorm—right?

The planning stages continue … and once again, Oregon has taught me that I have a lot to learn about living and gardening here! The learning curve has been incredibly steep, but I hope that I can keep an open mind and a watchful eye enough to realize that I need to be a good student or mother nature is going to hand me my ass up here.