Strawberry Transplants: Not for the Faint of Heart

 

I love having my kids help in the garden. This is the story of what can go wrong --but it has a happy ending.

 

We have a strawberry patch that needs to go. It is overrun by weeds and doesn't get much sun like it did a few years ago. I've also heard that strawberry patches should be moved every so often for a better strawberry yield.

Last fall I transplanted many plants to the unused sections of our seldom-used playground area. Amazingly, they survived the winter.

 

Then came the sad spring day when I was touring a college with my oldest while my husband and boys weeded the gardens at home. My husband texted, "Were the boys *supposed* to remove all the strawberries from the playground?"

 

I wanted to drive home immediately.

 

Despite efforts to replant the weeded plants, most died.

 

New project for me: transplant even more strawberries.

New project for the boys: build a fence from sticks.

 

 

Now it is clear to see that the corners of the playground are GARDENS. The little fence should keep out children, even if it doesn't work on cats.

 

 

Harvest Shot

The strawberries are in!

Just when I thought it would be a bad year for strawberries, I come back from a weekend holiday and find that the slugs, the birds, and the fox did not eat all of the fruit after all.

Harvest Shot

I love going outside on a rainy morning and coming inside with something like this.  The pop of a strawberry coming off the stem, the thrill of looking under leaves to find something red and round, the smell of wet dirt...it is a good morning.

This is the first day we've picked strawberries.  Last year, we got a very low yield after weeding out some Creeping Charlie two years ago. The weed wrapped itself around most of our strawberry plants, so to remove it required unearthing each plant.  We also had a drought that summer, so the weeding and replanting and baking in the sun was a bit too much for most of the plants to take. After two years, we're finally starting to get some strawberries back.  The ground ivy is still a problem, but I've promised the strawberries I'd be more vigilant about weeding it before it strangles them.

Oh, and I found a pretty egg when I opened up the chicken coop this morning. (See it nestled in the strawberries, above.)