We decided to go with a June bearing variety as opposed to an ever-bearing on the advice of Dianne's mom who is a graduate of Virginia's Master Gardener program. Her experience with ever-bearers was that you never got a big enough crop at one time to do much with the fruits other than just eat them. So we went with a June bearer hoping to get a crop that we can use for preserves. Of course there will be the inevitable crop losses when Mr. O is helping us pick. He loves him some strawberries.
We ordered 25 plants and they came as mostly roots. We trimmed the roots to 3" as the planting instructions noted and then buried the plants up to the crown making sure that the crowns were level with top of soil. Strawberries like a loose sandy soil with lots of organic matter. We have none of that in our native soil so we planted them in three different raised beds that we filled with a mixture of either horse manure and loamy topsoil or compost and topsoil. By the way the leafy green stuff on the right side of this picture is a hop plant that we hope will one day grow up and over the arbor in the picture. It dies back every year and then sprouts anew from a rhizome, so it's just getting started this year.
We spaced the strawberries pretty far apart in the raised beds. Like their wild strawberry cousins these cultivated plants send out runners that start new plants. So eventually our raised beds should be covered with a mat of strawberry plants. Wonder how long that will take. Our planting instructions advised picking off all the blossoms this first year to enable strong root growth. I think we'll adhere to that for the most part, but we might have to let a few go just to see and taste a couple homegrown strawberries.
Chicken update: Winnie and Coco are laying regular now. I was a bit worried about Coco a week ago because I had seen her on the nest twice but she hadn't layed anything. She got interrupted on Easter as we had guests over who wanted to check out the chickens - man did she put up a racket about that. She popped out of the hen house telling us off in clucks and squawks. A day or so later she finally layed. We've had a couple two egg days over the past four or five days so I think she got over it. Sure was fun dying (and eating) our homegrown eggs for easter.
5 comments:
I love this blog! No straw for the berries? [does introduce some weeds] When they start to bear you might want some kind of mulch to keep the fruit cleaner and prevent some of the molds and fungi from splashing up on the plants.
CCB
PS Glad Winnie and Coco are laying again.
Good point on the straw/mulch. Still probably a little early for that, but I checked them today and they're all starting to put on new growth. Pretty cool.
So you'll have to wait til next year then for your berries?
Is the asparagus up yet? How long does it take to get a decent crop of those?
Yeah, it's suggested that we not let the plants go to fruit this first season.
Yes, the asparagus is up. It's been coming up for a couple weeks now. This is the second year and you're supposed to wait two full years and then start harvesting a bit in the third year. When you initially start harvesting you're only supposed to pick the shoots for 2-3 weeks, then as the plants get older - say 5-6 years you can start picking the shoots for a longer period - maybe 6-8 weeks?
I'm a little dissappointed that the shoots coming up now are still pretty spindly. We've had a couple shoots that are maybe big enough to eat but we haven't picked them. At the end of last year's growing season we had a few really nice sized shoots come up - maybe a cm in diameter? So I was thinking we'd start off with bigger shoots this year, but it hasn't happened. Perhaps another application of horse poop when we put the asparagus to bed at the end of this season will help it make big thick shoots for eating in 2009.
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