Click on the image for a larger view of my "Amazing Cauliflower," freshly blanched and such a bright green color.

There is a guy with a fantastic front yard garden a few blocks from us, and we were wondering why his area was still laying at rest until just yesterday. Maybe he knew more than I did!

The late cool weather is extending the season for my spring crops though, like broccoli, cauliflower, peas, radishes and beets. The downside is that some things did not make it — for example, I am headed to Territorial Seed for a refund on a Sentinel Apple today because one of my columnar apples is fine but the other got too cold on the store lot and it didn’t recover to get leaves after planting. At least they are being very nice about it!

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.