A Round, Raised Strawberry Bed

Every year I try something new in the garden. This year I am growing strawberries in a raised bed, something I have wanted to do for awhile now. I dreaded having to get down on my hands and knees to pick them all again this year. Not to mention the weeding. I can never keep up with the weeding of the strawberry bed.

For the last few years my strawberry patch shared space with my blueberry bushes, which also made it hard to pick the blueberries without stepping all over the plants. I did not want to spend a lot of money on building raised beds  and have been trying to come up with an idea for years.

I tried growing them in straw bales , but when the bales rotted, as they must do eventually, the poor strawberry plants ended up back down at ground level again. I had to rescue them and put them in a hilled up bed in the veggie garden. They did fine there last season, supplying us with enough berries for both eating fresh and stocking the freezer, but they took up too much space in the garden and I still had to squat down  to weed and pick.

I think I have finally found a workable solution. Time will tell.  I am going to re-purpose the old galvanized, round bale feeder, from years back when we had 4 horses to feed. It has been sitting unused out in the woods. It is 8 feet across and 30 inches deep. Perfect.

Of course, water is something we have had way too much of for the past year, breaking all the previous annual rainfall records, with 68 inches in 2018. Just  in the last 24 hours we have had 5.6 inches and as of May 5th we are already at 19.8 inches of rainfall for the year. Watering has not been an issue yet.

I bought 9 yards of topsoil mixed with mushroom compost to fill my new round bale bed, which has turned out to be way too much. It would have been much cheaper and probably better to use composted barn manure but I did not have any finished compost sitting around. I will be cleaning out the barn soon, if the barnyard ever dries out, and then it will need to be turned and aged. I will have plenty of compost later in the season.

We rolled the bale feeder out of the woods, through the pasture and onto the back lawn in full sun. I will walk by it at least twice a day on the way to the barn to feed the horse and chickens.

Just before I left to visit my mother for a week, I ordered the topsoil delivery and built a ramp up to the new bed with the 2×6’s I normally use to load the push mower into the truck. Since the yard is not level (it IS West Virginia) I recycled an old rubber truck mat to fill the gap on the bottom side. I like to leave Jeff with a list of things he could possibly do while I am away and wanted to make it as easy as possible for him.

Seeing that it was going to be a little hard for us to reach four feet into the middle, I installed an old plastic water conditioner tank  in the center as a water reservoir before the soil arrived. I can run capillary ropes from it into the bed to slowly water the bed as needed.

Jeff pushed 46 wheelbarrow loads of soil up there while I was gone.  It was like magic. I only needed to add another 6 loads before I planted. Mine were not full loads as soil is heavy and I could only manage about 24 shovel fulls to a load. I only toppled the wheelbarrow once going up the ramp.

The 50 bare root strawberry plants(25 Cavendish, 25 Flavorfest    ) from  Nourse Farms arrived the second week in April and I planted them the same day. They grew leaves quickly and I mulched them after a couple of weeks. I was hoping to collect some pine straw from a neighbors yard but ended up using a couple of bags of shredded hardwood instead.  They seem happy.

 

 

 

Update: Strawberries-Fall 2019

The first planting of strawberries in the round bale feeder did so well that i installed another right beside it, planting the runners that grew from the first batch. There was enough soil leftover from filling the first bed to fill the second one as well. I used some old roof tin to fill the lower level gaps on the second bed and raked up pine needles from a neighbors yard for more mulch. Next spring we should have a great strawberry crop. I walk by on the way to the barn and pick out the few weeds without even hardly bending over. The capilary ropes worked great when I left for a week right after transplanting. The whole system is working  is great!

Elderberries and Blueberries

While I was ordering the strawberries, I also bought two more elderberry plants (Samdal and Samyl)   and 6 more highbush blueberries to fill out my 24 plant block. This will be way too many blueberries for us, so I will be trading berries for other things next year.

I added 10 pounds of pelletized sulfur to make the soil Ph more acidic for the blueberries and will be laying down cardboard and mulching over top of it to keep the weeds down. The tree pruners for the power company dropped off three dump truck loads of wood chips  this summer and I forked a thick layer of those over the cardboard around the blueberries in November. We have had plenty of rain and all the plants look healthy. I put hardware cloth around the babies to deter rabbits.

Crabapples and Dwarfing Apple Roostocks

I also talked to a friend who grows cider apples about what kind of rootstock I would need to graft the town crabapple to. I want to try and keep some part of this favorite tree alive since it will not live forever. I decided on a Cummins G-11 dwarfing rootstock for disease resistance and will  try my hand at grafting cuttings onto them. I ordered 10 bare rootstock for that project and then got 2 already grafted cider apple varieties ( Roxbury Russet  G-11   and Harrison G-11 ) so I can maybe make my own cider, later on down the road.

I planted the two trees and potted up the ten rootstocks, and so far, they all are growing their first leaves and looking good.

I will prune some cuttings from the town crabapple tree in a few weeks and graft some while attempting to root others. I am excited to finally be doing this. I have been meaning to for years, now.

Update: My cider apples grew well over the summer. The rootstocks I potted up for grafting the crabapple on are fine but the grafts did not take. I will try again this spring.

There are always so many possibilities and projects as a gardener that I will never run out of things to try.

Thanks for reading,

-Edgewise Wendy

writing at Edgewisewoods,

Edgewise Travels and Edgewise Wendy, once again. Winter allows me more time and our internet is finally working again.