Strawberries

Strawberries

Wednesday June 3

Today I did my first picking of the strawberry bed.

Not too bad for the first picking.

I love growing strawberry's. The main

reason I like to grow strawberries is for

my freezer jam. As I do not buy jelly

from the store. Its just one of those things

I do. Growing up in the midwest no one

we knew would buy jelly from the store.

Right now I have one large bed. Which I

believe is 9 rows. The bed measures 17 ft by

17 ft, there is small paths to walk down. We place

straw in the aisles to keep the weeds down.

This year we used leaf mulch at the beginning

of the season on the strawberry bed. Which acts also

as a mulch for the strawberries. We make

leaf piles and let them decompose for 2 years.

Since, we get a ton of leaves on our little homestead.

We might as well use them. We have sandy soil where

we live so you must continue to build the soil up.

The one thing we changed this year was inter planting

onions in the strawberry bed. I purchased onions seedlings

from a company in Texas in early spring.

This is called companion gardening. It is also about

using your space wisely. There is a book that I like,

its called Carrots Love Tomatoes.

http://www.amazon.com/Carrots-Love-Tomatoes-Companion-Successful/dp/1580170277/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244070610&sr=1-1

In this book she talks about how to plant good companions to

all sorts of plants. Flowers and herbs along with your vegetables.

What a grand idea.

This year I also have added flowers in the

strawberry bed also for a little color. As you can

see there is a row of chamomile along the Iris bed.

The new flower that I added this year is Salvia.

This is planted along the last row of strawberries,

along with the Iris row.



This picture shows an additional bed of strawberries

that I transfered in early spring. When I was fixing

the rows in the big bed, there are always extra plants.

In this picture you can see the onions we inter cropped.

Beside this bed I have an old cattle fence we use for

climbing flowers. This year I planted climbing Nasturium

next to the fence.




This picture is my very first bed of strawberries.

I began other beds of strawberries due to this bed not

producing very well. What I am finding out is that my

soil is very poor quality. After I applied the leaf mulch

and compost this year they are taller plants.

Happy Gardening!