Ha! Cower brief mortal! I am the master of some small perenial native UK fruiting plants

I have tamed the wild beast. From this...

...to this.

Strawberries? Not this year. Semi-permeable membrane berries is what I have.

I started digging over the ground and digging up the strawberries last weekend.

I boxed them up. Strawberries can stay bare rooted like this for a couple of weeks this time of year.




Harry finished the job on Friday and prepared the bed and covered it with horticultural membrane. On Sunday we'll cut holes in the membrane and plant through the black carpet. A mulch for the surface keeps the covers on during the March winds and the plants spread out to hold the covers down later on.



I'm looking forward to a bumper crop of fruit all clean and tidy and very little weeding.

Nice.

Weedberries.

The Strawberry patch ( Yes. I have a Strawberry patch) is becoming a pain.

The strawberries were great last year. We had plenty but a bit of a mix up in the replanting has caused a few problems. This tangled web of hands and knees weeding is the result. Believe it or not there are about 40 plants here. I can see six.



The strawberry bed is a fantastic idea but I made a hideous error that has continued to blight my strawberry progress. I forgot to "stale bed" the area that I wanted for the strawberries. So instead of waiting a couple of weeks to prep and tend a bed and methodically remove all weeds over the period of a couple of weeks before planting, I just put everything in the soil and watched helplessly as the weeds strangled my lovely berries.

A plot this size takes about two precious hours to weed. It's all hands and knees work with a small fork. You never get all the weeds and the bed is always rubbish. I tried mulching the bed. All that did was warm up the soil for a massive weed explosion. I had to remove the straw and the weeds. AAAAAARRRGGGHHHH!

This is the way I should grow strawberries. You get very neat and clean fruits, but you know what? You don't get that many berries with this method. A compromise is needed.


I'll think on.