Strawberries

 

So, strawberries arrived, and planting needed to commence. This is a location where we choose to plant them. It is quite shady place, partly shaded by the bush from east and a tree from west. We picked shady location because strawberries love loads of moisture, and we hoped that  in shady location the strawberries will be a wee bit happier.







The first step in preparation of the bed is to take out layer of the dirt so that chicken wire can be put in. Unfortunately that is necessary because we're plagued by ground squirrels, and putting the chicken wire inside the dirt is the best long term solution. It is important not to bury it deeper than 10 cm, less is preferable. If you bury it deeper the buggers will just dig tunnels above the wire. We removed approximately 5 cm of the dirt, because we planed to enrich the soil.




 So here it is dirt back on top of the wire, enriched with the 'top soil' we got from one of the chain hardware stores (it was cheep, around $3 per bag). You can see darker colour of the dirt. That indicates a soil with the loads of goodies in it for plants.
I also learned that woodchips that I had on top of the bed are bad for soil because if you dig them in they tend to rob a ground of the nitrogen.





So, to combact the fact that there is a lot of wood-chips inside the ground I put alpha-alpha as a mulch. This plant is a nitrogen gatherer, so by spring, when this hay is decomposed, my strawberries will get enough nitrogen.
The reason for mulching is to help ground retain moisture and prevent weeds from poping up.
Here the average moisture during the summer is around 20 to 30%  in the best case scenarios, which means, that naked ground gets dry withing the hour. Mulch is necessary to prevent that.



 However, although the alpha-alpha was great choice for mulch, it is a great attractant for rabbits we have in neighborhood. So, my husband insisted that some kind of barrier is put on top of the strawberries bed. At the moment, it is improvised, because my hubby is rather busy and has to deal with the other stuff, so as an additional deterrent I used the recipe I found on the net, water in which I soaked jalapeno and garlic. I put that deterrent just in case little buggers manage to get inside.
We plan later to put the wired fence around this bed, but that has to wait a bit, either for me to heal, or for my hubby to finish his pressing project.