Throughout the peak of the growing season the focus doesn’t venture too far from what needs to get done. Which means…the strawberries Jason planted in the spring…didn’t get too much attention once July hit. While we were busy tending to other aspects of food production, baby having, and life in general they spent their time shooting out gazzillions of runners and feeling a tad overwhelmed by weeds. Maintaining strawberries is turning out to be a lot of work. If we ever plant strawberry plants again, we will definitely be using plastic mulch. We are kicking ourselves for not doing so from the start. Really anything that is a permanent planting would benefit from some extra weed control help. It’s amazing just how quickly weeds accumulate and take over. Our thought is to at least put down some plastic in the pathways after all the rows get weeded and mulch directly around the strawberries with some coco peat.
::Before::
::After::
Tomatoes, summer squash, and beans are done. Jason took down the fencing from the tomatoes yesterday morning. Step one in fall garden clean up. For the most part now whats growing out there doesn’t require any maintenance, which frees up time to focus on other things…like weeding.
I think the photos above say enough by themselves. But I’ll simply chime in saying our spinach is beautiful and every bit as delicious as well. I LOVE spinach…always have, even as a kid.
More green cabbage. More sauerkraut needing to be made. I think there are 25 heads…waiting patiently, for their turn.
Pumpkins!! We just started picking and setting them out by the road. They too eagerly wait for someone to claim them and transform them into a Halloween jack-o-lantern, pumpkin pie, or maybe even pumpkin chilli!
Whats still growing? Winter squashes, basil, swiss chard, kale, green cabbage, hot peppers, sweet peppers, lettuce mix, spinach, and of course bird house gourds and pumpkins!
The more creative pumpkin uses from our excess this year turned into Pumpkin Enchiladas and Pumpkin curry soup – super yum! And I’ll have to admit to being a spinach-loving kid as well – not the opinion shared by most of pizza-loving grade school friends – but so delicious!
It all looks so lovely. That was a ton of weeding in the strawberry beds, but it looks great!
Everything looks so good Lisa and you are making great progress with the strawberries. Stay well.
Like the stone border on your strawberry beds! I may have to borrow that idea. Thanks!
We dug a trench around the edge of the bed about 9 inches deep or so and dumped in lots of the rocks we were digging up from the main garden space. Loads and loads of buckets of rocks. It looks nice when there’s not a ton of weeds covering it up.