Building a garden bed for strawberries

     Over the last several days Illijana and I have set about to construct a dedicated strawberry bed in our garden space.  We needed a sunny spot and found one that fit near our greenhouse.  We dug up the grass at the edge of the gravel pad we had put down for the greenhouse, dug up the weed mat that underlaid the gravel, moved some of the gravel, and laid out the bed shape.

Cutting the edge

Laying out the bed shape

The next step was to construct the raised beds using recycled deck boards given to us by our neighbors.

 

We laid out the boards, cut them to size, and used an Illijana inspired design nailing them together.

I then used a garden fork to loosen the soil at the base of the bed (like a double dig technique).  In the background you can see some of the soil conditioners I used in the bed.

I amended the soils we gathered from around the yard with a mixture of blood meal, bonemeal, cottonseed meal, greensand, and lots of compost.  The next photo is of our compost screener (a recycled plastic bread tray) as we loaded compost from the bottom of the pile to place in the new bed.

Finally, after many loads of soil, amendments, and compost were added, the bed was done.  Here is what it looks like before the planting of the strawberry plants.

It is too wet to till

It was a beautiful, sunny day here on the northern coast of California today, and I got to get outside and garden for awhile today.  I needed to weed a section of our front vegetable bed and then spread a batch of completed compost on the weeded area.  I also planted out some red cabbage plants I had waiting to get in the ground.

I tried to rototill part of the upper and lower gardens today, just to see if the ground was ready.  It wasn't.  Sometimes this early the ground is still too moist to till, and tilling only clumps up the soil.  I tried two small areas and checked out how the ground looked afterwards.  It was too "chunky", so the rest of the tilling will wait a few more weeks (a week free of rain would help.)
Here is some of the compost before spreading (and the weeds before weeding.) Click to enlarge.

Compost, seedlings, planting seeds, planting labels

This morning was a good astrological time to plant above ground crops so I planted four varieties of broccoli, two types of cauliflower, lettuce, and collard greens.  I planted the seeds in small 6 packs filled with Foxfarm Happy Frog potting soil.  I use a dibble to drill holes for the seeds, put in the seeds, usually two per cell, and water.  One of the key items during planting is the creation of a label for the 6 packs.  I use recycled venetian blinds which I cut to the appropriate length, and label with the information I want, which is type of seed, variety, seed company, year of the seed, and how many cells I planted and how many seeds per cell.  On one end of the label I write in the seeding date, and the moon phase.  All this info is written in pencil so the label is reusable at a later time.  Here is a picture of the labels from today. (Click to enlarge).

planting labels

tomato seedlings

While in the greenhouse today I noted that the first tomato seedlings I planted from seed last week were up.  Here is a pic of the first seedlings.






The second part of the garden day was spent with our compost.  We spread compost which was completed some weeks ago on one of the garden beds, and then built another compost pile in the tumbler using grass clippings from the lawn being mowed today.  To those clippings we add sawdust (redwood in this case) from a local cabinet maker, spent coffee grounds given away free at Starbucks, and finally a very small amount of a combination of blood meal, bone meal, cottonseed meal, chicken manure pellets, greensand, and dolomite lime.  Here is a picture of the ingredients.

compost tumbler

The tumbler being filled is pictured here.
All in all a very satisfying garden day!