Cosmo spring garden 2023

[flowerbug]

I use a foam kneeling pad for things like that.

yes, it saves a lot of bruising (clay is not forgiving when dry) to both knees and knuckles.

 

[flowerbug]

Kneeling pad ... Pillows

I'd have to crawl off to a pole bean teepee to pull myself back up to vertical!

Plastic milkcrate - not only a fairly comfortable height, it's somewhat of a cushion. It differs from an upside down 3 gallon bucket comfort-wise. Either one, you have to be sure that they are inverted before sitting down.

i usually am too busy to take all three pillows out with me but once in a while it is appealing to think that i might just kick back and watch the clouds awhile and listen to the birds, bees, windchimes, etc. that normally lasts but a moment though as i just have too much to do and the thoughts of what i still need to get done intrude on those daydreams of sloth...

i need padding, a hard chair, crate or bucket is recipe for disaster with my butt/lower back.

deep knee bends are exercise. by the end of an hour or two in the garden my legs have had a good workout. one of my winter exercises is 20-100 bends a day. i won't get those in every day but at least several times a week.

 

[donna13350]

Any goat owners here?

I raised sheep for years and they're very similar...except goats will eat everything ! Train them to come to you with food and a noise...anything from a whistle to a can with a few rocks in it to shake like a rattle...every time you feed them, make the noise..just be consistent....this will save your sanity when they escape..(and they will. LOL)...but if they're trained to come to a sound, you can get them back fairly easily.

 

[Cosmo spring garden]

Life got busy last year so my strawberry patch was neglected, like most of my garden.
This was no easy task but so glad to have it done. This is my strawberry patch I started last year. I have12 50foot rows in this patch (Almost 50ft) There were weeds, leaves, so many strawberry runners and hundreds of snails that I evacuated. It took several hours and after sharing a whole 5 gallon bucket worth of extra runners with friends, I am happy to say it is done and I am so excited about this strawberry season.
Last year was great for strawberry harvest but I'm hoping for bigger strawberries this year.
This patch has several different varieties of strawberries. Most are June bearing.
I also planted some extra runners in soil to replace any dead ones. And few trays to sell at my roadside stand.
What would be a fair price for a pack of 6 strawberry plants?

 

[Branching Out]

May I please ask if you have tips for growing strawberries? They are one of the plants that I am totally horrible at. I often end up with an ant farm instead of any berries, and when I do get a berry I have to find it before my pet rabbit does. She just loves them.

Friends have a productive patch, and they tell me that they 'do nothing to it'. Is that the secret sauce? Maybe I am trying too hard? This year I am growing small alpine type strawberries from seed to see if I can bring my game up, but I have no expectations given how it has gone in the past.

 

[Cosmo spring garden]

May I please ask if you have tips for growing strawberries? They are one of the plants that I am totally horrible at. I often end up with an ant farm instead of any berries, and when I do get a berry I have to find it before my pet rabbit does. She just loves them.

Friends have a productive patch, and they tell me that they 'do nothing to it'. Is that the secret sauce? Maybe I am trying too hard? This year I am growing small alpine type strawberries from seed to see if I can bring my game up, but I have no expectations given how it has gone in the past.

So I have grown them in two different ways: raised up soil beds and on flat ground using woven weed barrier fabric.
Raised row worked well for one year but we still had strawberries that rotted from touching the soil. The next year I made the mistake of not thinning the runners that almost all the strawberries were either very small or moldy from being in such a thick cover. And the soil had almost leveled out by year two.
The woven fabric forces me to thin the runners and I only allow 1 or max two plants per hole which are 12 inches apart in every direction. You have to use water soluble fertilizer for this method but besides that I absolutely love it! The strawberries are clean! Birds do see them and do peck quiet a few each day but if we harvest them in the morning the damage is minimal.
We also have rabbits and they do eat their share but again it's minimal since I have such a huge patch.

I had ants make hills in both methods. I just take my shovel, mess the hill up a bit and sprinkle some DE over it. After doing this few times, they tend to take the hint and move to another part of the garden. The fabric does make it harder to get rid of them with DE so I sometimes will just flush them out with the garden hose.

Fertilizing I do twice in the spring before fruit sets. I just use regular non organic water soluble fertilzer. But you can use organic fertilizer like fish emulsion or worm casting tea.

I also pull weeds while I'm harvestesting the berries.
I hope you give strawberries another try. They really are easy to grow and so delicious.

If bunnies are a problem, a simple row cover or even tulle fabric will keep them out.

Let me know how you like alpine strawberries.

 

[Branching Out]

These are all excellent tips--- thank you very much. I never gave a thought about keeping the berries clean, but that makes a lot of sense. I have Bio360 black film that I can use, and it would function very much like the black weed barrier fabric that you have on your patch. Diatomaceous earth sounds like a good idea too; I have a big bucket of it that I can use, and I will try to keep ant colonies from establishing in the first place. There are only 14 seedlings, so it will be a small and manageable strawberry patch. Those seedlings are now hardened off outdoors, and are sending out a few runners already. So far I have been pinching the runners off.

 

[SPedigrees]

Although spring is months away, I've just started to think about 2023's summer gardens. I neglected outdoor work last summer to continue on with a seemingly unending and still continuing indoor project (transcribing a roomful of old VHS tapes to digital), so this spring and summer I really have to take things in hand. Add to the neglect, downed branches and trees from a storm's high winds as well as my dying white pines (blister rust) that all need to be hauled into brush piles in the woods and in the swamp.

I have a new raised metal bed to install where I plan to grow both cherry tomatoes and crookneck summer squash. I also plan to use an existing raised bed for bush beans. The rest of my gardening will be flowers in containers both on the front porch and in a couple gardens. All my seeds are either saved from last year or purchased (from Baker and/or Pinetree seed cos) and ready to plant the1st of June, some starting earlier in pots on enclosed back porch.

The gardening bug is starting to bite, but I need to finish up my indoor stuff first, so this is good incentive to do so.

 

[Cosmo spring garden]

It was a very productive day! My FIL and DH worked on the goat barn some more and even made a little gate/door for it today.
We had to move some blueberry bushes from near the goat barn to where our two big bushes are. That was a lot of digging and transplanting but we got it done. I also had to move three raspberries to another area of the garden. While I was at it, I planted two gooseberry plants that arrived in the mail and 30 asparagus crowns. We had an asparagus patch but the location wasn't optimal so we decided to move those to the new asparagus patch as well. You can see it in the pic how big 4 or 5 year old crown can get. I hope we didn't kill them by moving them but only time will tell. We still have a whole row to move which we will do this week.
Also pruned the grapes with DH. The results are drastic but from what we have researched we are supposed to train them at second year.
Took some time to prune back the raspberry patch as well.
I'm exhausted but so happy with all the work we were able to get done.

 

[Branching Out]

We had an asparagus patch but the location wasn't optimal so we decided to move those to the new asparagus patch as well.

That must have been a HUGE job. Well done!