gardening

Don’t you just love the taste of fresh strawberries?   If you have never had a strawberry directly out of the patch you do not know what you are missing.   They are so sweet and delectable… just .. .YUMMY!   

You know what I hate?  Squirrels… particularly squirrels eating MY STRAWBERRIES!   Last year I had a lot of success hiding them in amongst my chives, garlic and onions… but weeding the patch was a nightmare. I wanted to put something together that was a bit more defensible.   Ergo… I want to tell you today how to make a raised strawberry bed. 

First, you need to figure out a place to put them.  Last year I put in a herb garden to keep my hubby happy.  It worked tremendously well and our Lizzie cat soon discovered it was a great place to watch for vermin to chase.  The squirrels avoided it, ergo… strawberry bed attached???  It is also in the full sun which strawberries adore.    I talked it over with my fellow and he agreed, good place for a strawberry bed. 

We laid the footing.  The patio stones are 24 x 24 and we picked them up last year for free from a guy who just wanted them gone for the price of labour of removing them.   It was hard work for the lad and I, but well worth it. Finding ways to have my teen help me in the garden is always a good thing. 

I love working with raised garden beds.  It makes it so much easier to work individual sections of a bed which reduces the pressure to get it all done. I find it easier to weed, easier to section off growing areas, and much easier to water. 

Mock it Out

If you are less of a planner and more of a wing it person you don’t want to miss the “mock it out stage”.  This is where you put your wood and check out what your project will look like. 

This gives you a chance to see if you basic idea is even going to work.  Does the wood you have fit the space planned?  And you can better see at what height you need to cut the wood. I continued this process as I worked my way through this project.  I was determined to do it all on my own if I could.  

How to Make a Raised Strawberry Bed

I’m … not a fan of power tools.   I have this tendency to not always pay the closest attention to what I’m doing and using hand tools reduces my risk of severe injury.  So I measured twice… and occasionally three times to mitigate the need to make any more cuts than I needed.   I followed my mock out. 

Needed supplies
Handsaw, screws, scrap lumber, staple gun with staples, saw horses, old lining from pond, filler, compost, good dirt.

Second Stage

Building stage two took a bit more working to be honest.  I hadn’t originally planned on building it the way I did, but hubby made a couple of suggestions and I thought them decent.   Just so you know, to build it I used scrap lumber we had lying around.  Wood from pallets and some from an old privacy fence. Lumber is a bit expensive right now so it’s good to make do with what you have at hand. 

Stage two took a lot more fitting together to make it work. I built the sides to fit to the height of where the herb garden stopped.  This part was super easy!  I just chose wood that was all the same width and ended when I was about halfway.  The longer part was more difficult and actually resulted in me putting wood into a clamp on hubby’s work table to cut and inch off the width, length-wise.  GAH… that was a challenge! 

I lined it all with old pond liner.  I learned that our small stapler is called a T150!  🙂 Knowing this makes it a whole lot easier to order staples when stores are in lockdown.   The Liner means I won’t have soil leaking out of the bottom.  Since it’s all bits and pieces I didn’t have to worry about it becoming water logged.

Once the liner was in I put a broken (accidentally!) fountain in the bottom.  My sister gave me a fountain water feature for our pond last year. They had upgraded and thought I could make use of the old one.  Bad planning/timing/footing caused it to fall unexpectedly and it shattered.  I put it to good use anyways.  I would have rather had the pond feature but one uses what one has at hand eh?  As I planned out how to make a raised strawberry bed I wanted to do so as cost-effectively as possible. 

Next, I filled my strawberry bed with compost.  All the way up to the top, and finished off with a thin layer of dirt.  Letting it settle with rain.  Compost always needs to settle before you plant it. Strawberries love a good loamy, well draining soil so putting compost down and then adding the best soil ever from my garden. The worms will break down the compost and mix in the added dirt and before you know it the whole thing will be filled completely with the best soil ever!  🙂 

What makes my garden dirt the best dirt around?   Using compost that it predominately rabbit manure gives me a soil that is rich in worms and nutrients.  My garden grows well.  I suppose you could say that everything I grow is organic.  I used to sell most of my rabbit manure.  It was a lot of work with people liking to complain or leaving a huge mess when they came to get it. I decided I’d rather use it all and/or share with friends than deal with that aspect of customer service.  

A nice week of rain settled the compost and dirt 4 inches so I topped it up to a bit overflowing. Planted my strawberries.  And now… they flower!  🙂   It does my heart good just like spending time outside is good for well-being.  Want to know something else that’s good?  Saving money!

SchoolhouseTeachers.com is having a sale right now (affiliate link).   Use the code OUTSIDE to save!  

Normally I would nip off the flower buds so my plants get stronger and fruit more profusely next year, but my patch has been operational for the past three years. All I’ve done is replant them so it’s good to see them flowering which means they have recovered nicely. 

When the strawberries start to fruit I’m going to place hoops over them and cover them with netting.  This way I can get into them, but the squirrels will hopefully be held off. 

I hope this post has helped you know how to make a raised strawberry bed of your own.   Just choose a nice sunny location and use good loamy, well-draining soil and you too can have strawberries that you can protect from the squirrels.  🙂

Looking for ways to use your strawberries?  Or needing to buy some tools?  Check out my affiliate links to Amazon. 

I somehow got the order mixed up on the blog challenge from the crew.  Since I skipped over summer flowers I figured I would use that as a word prompt.  I do love my summer flowers, the beauty that they bring, and I thought I’d walk you through the process of creating blossoms.  

You know that expression… bloom where you are planted?  It takes time to do that you know?   

Preparing the Soil

new bedBefore any growth can occur, the ground in which the plants are in needs to be prepared.  For me that means in the fall I add in compost and turn the soil over.   In the spring I turn the soil again and any areas that didn’t get my summer compost will have winter compost added.  I leave one garden without compost as year-old soil is better for beans.  Sometimes I have to build a new bed. All this helps my garden to flourish.  I can always tell the gardens that didn’t have the proper amendments made.  They don’t do as well. 

Children are the same way you know?  They need a well-prepared soil, prepared in a way that suits them.  Whether it’s done sooner or later doesn’t always matter, and sometimes the best amendments are to leave things alone.  But preparations need to be made.  Soil needs to be turned, thought given to what will go where, and proper care taken. 

Planting

Whether you plant seeds or started plants changes how you plant. 

A started plant will need hardening (where you get the plant used to a new environment).  Then planting and minding, making sure it gets the water that it needs for growth. 

Seeds need to be planted to the right depth.  Some need to be moistened before planting to ensure good germination and still others need to be kept in the dark as sunlight makes them dormant. 

So it is with children.  I wouldn’t toss a child who has always been homeschooled into the world of public school without preparing his heart and mind.   Children need seasoning and care taken to ensure they have the ability to handle the rigours of life.  Doing everything for them doesn’t encourage their growth, and yet, not doing enough for them, giving them incremental steps, helps them develop the skills they need. 

Creating room

Sometimes, especially when you plant seeds, you get the plants a little close together.  When this happens you need to thin them out.   When you do so depends on the gardener.  Some do so as soon as the plants come up, others wait until the plants start to produce, and yet again, others do so at any point in between.  Giving plants room to grow provides a more abundant harvest. 

BUT there’s another thing that happens as plants grow…. since there’s soil and water and basically everything that plants need to grow… volunteer plants show up!   Some of these will be good volunteers (like my ground cherries that self-seed) and others will be what around here is called rabbit food.  WEEDS!   Weeds are really any plant growing where it’s not supposed.  It could be an errant bean plant or potatoes, or more likely plants such as pigweed, ragweed, thistles, dandelions, grasses and the like.  What weeds you get depends on where you are in the world. 

So it is with families

Have you ever noticed the same is for children?   They need room to grow. They don’t need to be crowded in by others just like them, they need the diversity, and space to spread their wings.  When and how that room to grow comes in… depends on the child and who is minding them.   

Just as the gardener will pluck weeds out of the garden, the one who minds a child will keep watch for weeds that pop up that could harm their child or make it difficult for them to grow.  This isn’t always the easiest thing to do.  Does one promote only Christian friends for their child?  What if something in their family history could be harmful?  So many what-ifs, it can be difficult to know what to keep and what to weed out. 

Trimming back/Pruning

Last week I performed what for me is a difficult task.  Deciding what growth to keep in my tomato plants and what to cut away.  I HATE this task.  I’m always afraid that I will muck something out, cutting out what is actually necessary for production.  If I don’t do it though, it sucks away the plant’s strength and results in a reduced harvest. 

We need to do the same with our young, and just like with plants it is not the easiest thing.  Is that spirit of grumbling a teenage thing or the sign of a prune job needed?  Is that new friend just the person needed to spur a child on to greater heights or a weight to cause untold sorrow?  Or that spirit of selflessness, is it a cry for help, a burgeoning lack of confidence or rather a child who has a servant’s heart?   Through discernment we prune the suckers out of a child’s life, setting them up for the next stage… the harvest!

Creating Blossoms

It’s the goal of every gardener isn’t it?  The harvest!  We don’t spend all our time with soil prep, planting, weeding and pruning just to say Oh yes, I grew a garden and I got some beautiful leaves.  Like seriously…that is NOT our goal. We want our produce, whether it be beautiful flowers, or a bountiful harvest of beans, beets, corn or lettuces. 

The same as it’s the goal of a parent, to produce a healthy harvest as well.  A parent’s harvest is an adult capable of holding a job, caring for those around, and living out (if believers) the faith they were raised in.  Sometimes, those goals have to be adapted to the child you are raising (due to special needs) but in the end, a parent wants to raise an independent adult.  This is the harvest of parenting. 🙂 

What steps do you think are necessary in creating blossoms in your offspring?  How about in your garden? 

The challenge word this week is gardening.  Even thought it’s only April I already have plants growing in my garden!  It’s a wonderful thing to watch little plants grow.  (Much like I enjoy watching little rabbits grow).  🙂  How is this possible with the cold weather we’ve been having?  I built a very rough cold frame to protect them.  I thought I’d walk you through how to build a simple cold frame. 

Why This Build?

I know it probably would have been better to build an actual cold frame.  Cut some wood, attach the plastic and what not.  Should have, but I didn’t.  I figured that fold away frames and plastic sheeting would do the trick without creating a storage problem.  I am actually hoping over the summer to create a cold frame that I can easily store. I’ll use wood, PVC, plastic sheeting and zipties.  Stuff I have around the house.  But for a quick fix this spring, during a week of warm weather, this is doing the trick quite nicely.

What you need

You will need

• odd pieces of PVC.  I used to have a dog and we did agility so I used the pieces from the old agility equipment.  OR you can buy new and cut them to size. 
• Plastic sheeting
• zipties, baler twine, something to attach the sheeting to the PVC
• long branches at least nine feet long
• scissors

Doing the Build

I sorted out the long sections of PVC pipe to figure out what lengths I had available and where to fit them in the garden. 

Then it was just a matter of matching similar lengths together, and using them to build a basic shape.  I wanted to have a longer support on the top and then two legs to stick into the soil.    Placed about 10 inches apart and covered with plastic sheeting would protect my young plants from frost.  I connected the lot with elbow or t’s whichever fit.  

I wasn’t looking for pretty, just functional.  Red-neck fixes are just fine for me.  🙂  The importance was… would it work.  It’s not like I was pursuing the art of gardening today. 

What I have loved about this build is that when we had a big wind storm come through I just pushed the supports lower into the ground and nothing blew away or apart. 

OH, but don’t let me get ahead of myself.  I secured the plastic sheeting to the supports using a pair of scissors to cut small holes in the plastic.  Then it was just a matter of pushing through some baler twine to tie it down. 

Finishing off

I used bricks once I had everything secured to simply hold the plastic down so it wouldn’t blow around in the wind. 

Couple other quick cold frame builds

I also made a couple of other quick builds.  One for early peas (a teepee shape) and a light protect for lettuces. 

This build was really easy.  I stuck branches in the ground and then wove baler twine around it.  It was then a matter of planting peas and then winding my leftover plastic sheeting around it and tying it in place. 

I did one of these for the first time last year, in a plastic barrel, and it was great to get some early peas.  🙂  This is my first year trying it out in an actual bed.

The other build I did was very similar to the first one, but I didn’t have enough plastic to cover the sides.  This makes it an open cold frame which doesn’t offer the same protection.  I planted seeds that need very little protection (so parsley, purlane etc) stuff that is predominately for the bunnies. 🙂 

More Help

Now, you might not be like me and want to simply make do with what you have.  Perhaps you would like to know more than how to build a simple cold frame. You may be more skilled in the area of carpentry, or simply like something else better.  I don’t blog a lot about gardening, but one of the people I follow who knows TONS about gardening and actually blogs about it is Kim at Homestead Acres. 

I’ve listed some resources below that might help you.  Just so you know, I did use my amazon affiliate link.

How about you?  Have you been out in the garden lately?  Planted anything or had lovely flowers come up or anything?  Share your gardening posts with me!