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.

The downside to this is that it takes FOREVER if you are impatient! (My husband is quite horrified at the idea that his front yard will probably have patches and holes in it for a few years until this all takes.) Instead of digging up the whole front yard and putting this in, I am just slowly replacing my grass with these groundcover plants every time I find a hole or have to dig out some sort of undesirable weed.

For my groundcover, I chose Elfin Miniature Thyme (Thymus serpyllum) from the Stepables collection. (They seem to be available locally here during the spring from several nurseries as well as Fred Meyer.) It is a compact, tightly matted plant with slower growth that produces pretty flowers in the summer. It tolerates heavy foot traffic and stays green all year. Once established, it doesn’t require a lot of water and it tolerates long periods of sun.

Before we moved in here, the house had been sitting vacant for a long time, and there are no sprinklers so the grass was pretty much dead. This, for me, set the bar in terms of what the yard would do if left completely unattended – the grass would die by fall and the trees (more suited to this habitat) would continue on just fine. So the groundcover is my answer of how to make that part of the yard "survive" the summer with little care.

Along with replacing the lawn with this groundcover, I am encouraging moss growth as a native groundcover. It is really quite pretty and soft, and grows with such little effort in this soil. To feed the moss and encourage growth, I fed it a mixture of buttermilk and compost tea (a recipe from the Lovejoy book). I also wanted to enrich the soil as a whole (feed the soil, not the plants!), so I spread chicken compost around the front yard and let the rain dissolve it into the ground. (Besides making the process easier, I am really glad it was raining during both these applications because it meant that my neighbors were not out in their yards while I was doing this. I really didn’t want to explain to them, being the new kid on the block, why I was putting buttermilk and chicken crap all over my front lawn!) I purchased the chicken compost from Rexius, a local green recycler.

Overall it seems to be going well although there are a few snags in this process – such as what to do about the lawn during this growing phase. I can’t mow it because I don’t want to damage the groundcover that I am trying to establish, but I imagine the lawn will eventually grow taller. I have been hacking out any tall grasses (some sort of fescue) by hand, as well as any undesirable weeds (usually the ones with spikey leaves). I then replace these holes with more compost mixture and another groundcover plant. Eventualy, I may have to just mow down part of the lawn with the edge trimmer to keep it manageable without whacking the groundcover or anything else out there. (One of the fun benefits of not mowing your lawn is that you get to see what else pops up – I’ve had everything from delicate wildflowers to iris and hyacinth blubs.)

I am up to 6 or 7 of these "groundcover plugs", with lots of moss mixed in the grass. I’ll keep updating with pictures as this progresses.

In theory, at least. We will see how this actually works out!

I think most people would select one or two varieties that best complimented their needs, but I went with seven total because I’m going for this wild/forest-looking concept. They were all selected based on their tolerance of sun/heat, drought resistance, and speed of growth. (I’m impatient, what can I say?) These are the finalists:

• Grass replacement: Elfin Miniature Thyme (Thymus serpyllum) As the grass dies off or gets weeded out, I will slowly replace it with this low-growing groundcover. It stands up to heavy traffic, is drought tolerant once it is established, and it produces these wonderful little flowers. It stays green year-round and never needs mowing like a lawn. I can’t wait until my "icky ol grass" turns into a luxurious "living carpet"!
• Corner strawberry bed: Baby Tears (Sedum album ‘Chloroticum’) This will fill in nicely between the strawberries, hiding under their leaves during the hottest months, and bringing blooms every spring. I’m also hoping these will somewhat distract the deer from eating the strawberries, as deer typically don’t like sedum plants but I have already caught them rummaging through my varieties of strawberries!
• Fast growers to live around the landscaping: White Star Creeper (a white-flowered Pratia angulata), Alpine Geranium Charm (a pink Erodium reichardii), County Park (purple-flowered Pratia pedunculata), and Double Alpine Geranium Flore Pleno (a light purple-flowered Erodium reichardii). These may vary in their tolerance of the amount of foot traffic, but what they all do have in common is their tolerance of varying water conditions and bright sun at certain times of the day. They are all moderate to fast growers during the peak season as well.
• The landscape accent plant: Victor Reite, Dwarf Thrift (Armeria) This plant tolerates light foot traffic and looks like a mini grass bush with taller flowers.

The soil was simply prepared by hand-mixing the soil, the top layer of bark mulch, and some composted elements. I pushed down on each plant as I dropped it into the hole to keep them level with the ground. The plants were also watered well after being planted.

I know these will take a few years to really spread out and become established, but I am trying to think of my garden in terms of the long run (say, the next decade or two) instead of what looks good right now. I am also getting continually bombarded with surprises in this yard, because plants keep springing up everywhere that the previous owners must have planted.