Strawberry Box

This is what we woke up to last Thursday Morning, March 22nd, the 2nd official day of Spring. The next day we enjoyed sun and warm skies.



On Saturday I spent most of the day leveling this area next to the raspberry boxes. The Littles spent the day elsewhere and it kept me fairly occupied. I also had a couple stop by to view one of the puppies and they happily went home with him. It was the kind of visit where they had pretty much already had made up their minds, so we spent the visit talking about him and what to expect of him when they got home with him.



On Sunday we continued to work on leveling the ground. Here I've place the boards of the box I want to have in this area to see how level it looked. I went ahead and screwed the box together reusing the screws I collected taking the boxes apart.



Here we have attached hardware cloth. Looks pretty neat. I also use the cloth to square up the box since I have no inner bracing.



This time I found another hammer for our Teddy to use and he gently tapped the staples in. One of these times he will find out how gut wrenching a hammer feels to his thumb, but fortunately he didn't this time.



An easy tip up and step one end over then the other end over and let the box drop into place. I used a tape measure to make sure it was positioned with just enough space in between the boxes to allow for pavers in the future. Then there was the custom ceremony dance.



Monday morning found us driving to the nursery for soil. We got a half yard of raised bed garden soil for $14. The littles like to watch it get loaded into the back of the ranger. The soil is alot lighter in weight than hauling gravel. A half yard of soil is about 5 wheel barrow loads while a half yard of 5/8" minus gravel is 7 wheel barrow loads. Since I had the 2 side gates open I also removed 3 wheel barrow loads of compost leaves that one of my sons put into my yard debris box to get it out of his way.



We also got 75 more strawberry plants. They come in bundles of 25 plants packed with a little bit of potting soil. These ones are ever bearing. I like ever bearing because they don't send out a bunch of shoots though they will keep making berries until the fall and everyone is sick of them.




Here's the dirt when we got home.



Here's the dirt in the box. I also remeasured it to make sure it was where I wanted it and leveled it. I move a bit of gravel to cover some of the dirt we were walking on.



Here's the strawberries in the dirt in the box. I ended up planting 116 plants in this box. Some of the plants I got from Home Depot didn't look like they were growing but I left them in the old wheel barrow along with the 2 new grapes and the one old grape I dug up. Digging up the old grape kind of reminded me of the movie "A Walk in the Clouds" I kept asking it if it was alive.



Here is one of the first of canes of Raspberries that I planted a couple weekends ago. It's looking pretty good.