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.

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.

Note: If you haven’t signed up for Territorial’s Newsletter, I would highly recommend it. They send tips to my inbox monthly, and they have started a new instructional video series on their website. You can sign up on the left side of their homepage.

A lot of the seeds I will be using this year are leftovers or saved seeds from last year, but I am adding a few new things and new varieties from my past year’s selection. From this trip, I picked up the following:

• Packman Broccoli
• Apollo Broccoli
• Lime Crisp Cucumbers
• Fairy Tale Eggplant (growing eggplant is entirely new for me)
• Cherry Belle Radish
• French Breakfast Radish
• Early Wonder Tall Top Beets
• Sugar Sprint Peas
• Oregon Giant Snow Peas
• Oregon Sugar Pod II Peas

As I like to put my broccoli in the ground before the frost date (it tends to get wiped out when the weather warms up), I already have that started in my garden window. I went with one row each of Packman Broccoli, Apollo Broccoli, Purple Sprouting Broccoli, and Broccoli Rabe. Last year, I used large plant bulbs in domes to produce light and heat for the seedlings, but I had a lot of problems with the bulbs burning out every 3 weeks. This year, I am trying out seed heating mats with my standard seed trays and little peat pots — the mat can’t be seen in the picture above, but it is inside the base which the seed tray sits in. For lighting, I am using a hanging fluorescent lighting fixture with a full spectrum plant light for the second year in a row. So far, so good — my broccoli came up in only a few days! The whole setup has a plastic dome on it to keep it warm and moist, although I do remove the dome twice a day to pour the condensation back on the seedlings and check on them for any problems.

With the frost date so early this year, I will probably be dropping my tomato seeds into the other seed kit in the next week or so. The melons, cucumbers and pumpkins will wait until about 3 weeks before my estimated planting day. I also have a tendency to pick up other seedlings here and there, so the window collection will definitely grow in the next few months.

Tip: To get a general planning guideline for the timing seeds and planting, see this tool from the Farmer’s Almanac. Your mileage may vary though — I found that the multi-harvest broccoli I grow (broccoli that produces side heads after the main head is cut) does great in cooler weather but either flowers or gets wiped out by cabbage moths in later spring, so I plant it earlier than the suggested dates to get the most out of it.

(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.

My mom says a true Oregonian goes out in all kinds of weather. To one-up her on that notion, I say a true gardener will go out to save the garden in any sort of weather. So there I was, in thunder and downpour, standing in a sinking bed of mud, pruning and staking the tomatoes. (Yes, I know you’re not supposed to prune or stake when the leaves are wet, but it was either that or have a bunch of main branches on a few bushes snap off—I did what I had to do!)

This week’s (wet) lessons learned:

You do what you have to do, and sometimes it works out okay.

The tomatoes that were tied and pruned while wet were actually okay … so far. It’s probably not the best idea for an extended cold/wet snap, but it works for those freak storms like this one where the weather warms up significantly the next day. (And, again, you do what you have to do—a light pruning while wet was better than losing the entire branch from the weight.)

Small bamboo sticks don’t hold up to Oregon weather.

Those bamboo stakes I brought from California did not hold up very well in Oregon. You can see where the bamboo stake had snapped with water/weather/weight and is now running horizontally in the middle of this picture (larger version):

Free branches rock.

The cherrywood and curling willow branches I picked up for free off Craigslist, however, do stand up wonderfully. They are much taller, stronger, more flexible, and more resiliant than the little bamboo sticks. They also give the whole thing a new, funky vibe:

Weather is fun.

It is probably wise to count seconds between the thunder and lightning if you are standing outside and gardening in a storm. If they get too close together, run in the house … quickly.

Weather and environment can drastically change your plants.

One of the plants that took a huge topple was a red currant tomato. This particular plant (I have 2 of them) happens to be from a small packet of seeds from the Martha Stewart Collection at K-Mart that I bought about 3 years ago. The packet describes it as

‘Red Currant’ Tomato, Lycopersicon esculentum var. pimpinellifolium
A wild tomato from South America. Tangy, sweet, crisp, and just 1/2" in diameter. Very prolific, grows in long clusters on vigorous vines that are easier to harvest if trellised. Good disease resistance.

The first year, a "normal" weather year in Concord, CA, these seeds produced neat 4-5′ bushes with ample fruit and leaves. The second year, where we had late cold and then blazing heat, they were small little shrubs with a lot of fruit and barely any leaves. This year, after moving to Oregon, this same packet of seeds is producing these beautiful 6-8′ vines that I finally discovered after the storm and had a crazy time tacking up! It’s just amazing to see what an heirloom or wild variety of plant will do in response to changes in the environment, where as a modern variety of tomato (created for a specific commercial purpose) might not be able to adapt to changing weather conditions as well.

Plant spacing is not overrated.

As I’m considering how I would change things for next year, I definitely think I will make the garden bigger overall but put more traveling pathways within the garden. There’s nothing like having to fix these fallen tomatoes, stepping into the garden while balancing precariously around a bunch of sharp support sticks, and having my foot sink about 8" down. The one bit of good news, though, is that the ground has somewhat compacted—when I first added the dirt, the sink level was about 12-18" deep.

I can’t dismiss some of the benefits of the spacing, however. For example, my basil is growing fantastically in the filtered sunlight below the tomatoes, and my fall broccoli is being kept from blazing sun in the same manner. The soil is also drying out slower, the plants are working to support each other as they grow, and the planting density is doing a great job suffocating out most of the weeds.

A few weeks ago, I answered an ad on Craigslist for someone who had cut down a cherry tree and had a bunch of the wood laying around. I asked them if they had any of the branches left, and they did. When I went to pick it up, they also had branches from a curling willow they had chopped down. I had wanted to use the cherrywood for the fence trellis, but the curling willow just looked so cool.

The other day I decided it was perfect for some freestyle pea supports. You don’t need a lot to make this happen—just some gloves to protect your hands, something to cut the branches with (loppers and pruners), gardening wire and snips to cut it, and the branches.

The idea is to fashion little teepees in each container, and then secure places where they overlap with the gardening wire. I like to snip mine pretty close to the joint to prevent anyone getting scratched, but you may want to leave yours longer if you want to reuse the wire later.

With the peas, I had let them overgrow too long, and so I had to lift and pull them back into place, separating some of the tendrils in the process. There were also some casualties, as the pea plants snap rather easily, which is also why I should have done this earlier.

The end result makes a nice conversation piece and supports your plants!

The peas were trellised this week (a bit too late, but I’ve been busy!) and the evergreen blueberry bush has been planted in a wine barrel container.

The baby peppers were dropped in their coconut pots into 4 in plastic pots, while the taller ones got a bath in the sink to remove aphids from their tops. The peppers will be heading into the outside garden soon. I also harvested the top of some of my basil plants.

Yes, it’s just as you are picturing it—I walked along the rails and squatted down to plant each plant in the row. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, as I got a great workout and the cedar rails helped me line up things to get them equally spaced. I started in the middle of the beds, and then worked the beams outwards until I had planted nearly all the bed.

I now have a neatly planted garden with:

• several varieties of tomatoes
• broccoli
• celery
• corn
• 3 kinds of cucumbers, one from starts and 2 from seeds
• sweet, lemon and lime basil
• sweet potatoes
• strawberries (I’m not even sure what kind, as I started out with 5 varieties and they are planted all over the house, some were given away, etc)
• blue lake bush green beans (planted from seed with a bit of legume innoculent)

This week I will also be adding carrots, radishes and beets from seed; eventually the peppers will also go in.

I can’t wait until the first harvest!

In other news, I also had the back step fixed, and I took it out of the concrete molds myself this morning. The original step was this broken down, narrow brick thing which was an accident waiting to happen until it actually did. A busted knee, ankle and hand later, I decided it had to go sooner rather than later. Here is the original brick step

and here is the new step, which is made from concrete that I exposed the aggregate on.

It was actually a lot easier than I thought, and it was done without any of that special chemical used to keep the top from setting … basically just a brush and a bit of water, watched carefully over a day or so. The exposed aggregate basically matches the concrete used on the rest of the patio, and will be the same treatment the side of the house will be getting when the new step is poured to replace out the rotten deck we removed. I used a larger brush on the overall surface, and (funny enough) a little nail brush on the top part to get under the sill. I redid the treatment 3-4 times over the course of a day and a half, after waiting for the initial set period, until it was a look I liked. On the last time, I also brushed the sides (once the frame was removed) and scrubbed some of the extra off the bottom. I still need to clean it up a bit more, but I really like it! I think the trick is to not use a heavy hand on it—you can always go back and do more, but you can’t replace that which you have scrubbed too hard on! So I poured a bit of water on it and lightly brushed the surface until I was happy with what I had.