I’m going to try to catch up on a few LONG overdue posts so here’s a start. 🙂
May 1st was a holiday here in Germany. Since S was out of town for business during the weekend, he decided to take Monday off so we would basically still have a weekend…and a very short work week. Always a nice thing.
Naturally the time off was spent working on things around the house…and we FINALLY put the strawberry plants back in the ground! We lost several of them because it was so hot in the yard the last few weeks and they just couldn’t hold enough water while they were sitting on the ground in the yard. But we still ended up with two full 3 meter rows of strawberries which we’re thinking will be plenty for us this year. We actually had 3 rows 7 meters long of strawberry plants when we first saw this house almost a year ago! It would have been complete strawberry overload around here.
Above you can see the new home of the strawberries. Preparing this bed was no easy task since the ground was rock hard. The previous renters in our former rental house left us a Garden Claw (one of those metal claws that you stab into the ground and turn to break up the soil) which we put to very good use. Along with that a hoe, hubby and I think we made quite good progress. Of course there are another 5 beds to go but we will try not to remind ourselves of that again. Plus it’s been raining for the past few days so the going should be a bit easier.
In spite of the poor conditions, the strawberry plants did in fact start blooming already which we are quite excited about. When we replanted them, only one or two plants had blooms. Now almost all of them do 🙂
Although you can’t really see them, the grassy area above to the left of the raised beds and greenhouse is what is becoming our herb garden. I replanted the bay leaves, rue bitterwort, spring onions, lavender and some unknown herb plant along here. There was already a huge lavender plant growing in here so it seemed like a good place for them. Plus we didn’t really have any plans for this space yet since part of it still has raspberry bushes planted in it. At this stage I think we will let the raspberries have one more year of life before we get rid of them. It’s not that we don’t like raspberries, we love them. But for some reason they just don’t taste right when grown around here. We’ve tasted fruit from our own bushes and a few random neighbors last year and all of them just tasted off. I’m thinking blackberry bushes will be a nice replacement though 🙂
