So after a year of not being able to garden, I am playing catch up. I have a bed of strawberry’s that originated from three tiny plants that were rescued from the house next door. The old strawberry bed was literally covered over with weeds. Buttercup and other root spreading weeds. So I was not able to just dig out a few from underneath the cover of weeds and plant them. They would have been full of weed roots. So I had to dig out a few small strawberry plants and literally undo the weed roots from the strawberry’s. I then planted them in pots so that I could pull them out if weeds started to grow, and undo the roots again and replant. After several months, the three plants were then planted in the garden and allowed to ‘run’. I pegged runners to make more plants. I shared a lot of runners, but they still got a bit out of control last year while I recovered from my broken shoulder. Today was the day I was able to dig out some, rearrange others and I now have a proper strawberry bed. It took several years, but here we are.
You may wonder why I went to all this trouble for these plants and didn’t just buy new plants. Well...I have done that many times over forty years, trying many varieties. They were nice enough, but when we finally got a few berries off of these plants, we were thrilled to find out they were the largest, reddest, sweetest and most delicious strawberries any of us had ever tasted. I dug out all of the other varieties I was growing and set about propagating these. I have no idea what the variety is, but they remind me of strawberries my grandparents grew in Ontario when I was little. So I will have these until the day I die. Seriously. Yummmm.
No comments:
Post a Comment