Welcome to Friday!

It’s been a busy week around here, both work-related and home-related. Stefan is taking a few days off so we can enjoy the awesome springlike weather we’ve been having and get a few projects done around here that need doing. And yesterday we spent a few hours getting our beds in the courtyard ready to go…once we have some seedlings to put in the ground or after we know this weather is here to stay.

If you’ve been following our courtyard garden since last year, you know we had about 10 strawberry plants that we adore. And when I say we, I mostly mean Mackenzie…because she’s always over there picking the fruit off of them before anyone else can get over there to save them. Not that we mind her helping herself to the spoils of our garden. That is one of the reasons it’s there after all — no kid should ever think that fruits and vegetables just come from the store!

At any rate, last year our strawberries plants spread out from just the trim of our container beds into the rest of the beds…and I let them do it because I had every intention of using those shooters to plant twice as many strawberries the next year. And my plan couldn’t have worked out better!

If you’re not familiar with growing strawberries, they are super easy to grow and many varieties will continuously produce until your first frost. Awesome! I also think they look really pretty when the leaves get huge, and I always say that if we have a long sidewalk in our next house, I’m going to line it with strawberries. You can never have too many strawberries in this house!

As the strawberries grow throughout the year, you will notice little shoots coming off your main plants. Most of the time, they will establish something like air roots, but if you  take these shoots and stick them into pot or the ground nearby, they will eventually grow roots. Then you can cut the cord and replant the strawberries elsewhere.

Now you might be wondering how quickly you can multiply strawberry plants. I will say that I left ours planted from the time they were long enough to plant until the next spring. Since we have cold winters, I covered all our plants with extra dirt and a lot of people around here also use straw. Otherwise the base of your plants dies, and you won’t be growing strawberries for long. I also like to leave the plants in the ground all winter, because even when the leaves wilt and die, you often will see green coming up the next spring. So you just trim back the dead stuff and get going.

Our plants developed really nice root systems and are all looking great a few days later after transplanting. Always make sure to take a spade hand spade full of dirt with you when you move them sot hey don’t go into shock in the new environment. Growing strawberries really couldn’t be much easier, and you’ll end up with more plants each year. The offshoots are usually the best producers as well and the older plants will eventually start to produce only a bit of fruit after several years, when the woody stuff starts to develop at the base of the plants.

All of the strawberry plant moving was so that I could have access to the bed where they’ve been growing all winter. It’s our designated tomato bed because it’s under the roof of the guest house, which is the only location that we’ve had luck with so far for tomatoes. I still happened to have two bags of dirt laying around, so one of those went into the tomato bed where the strawberries had been hanging out.

And we put up our square foot gardening grids in the courtyard beds so they are ready to roll. We didn’t actually attach the wood pieces to each other for now, because it turns out that the bricks we used for the beds are exactly 1 foot long. So we just cut the strips and laid them in the beds, which should work for the time being. I’m really excited to see how all this goes in the coming year…I do think I’m really going to like SFG, though.

Ok, do you want to see something adorable? You may recall that I planted carrot seeds before the winter really rolled in. Now those carrots have done a whole lot over the last months. I pulled one up for Mack before it got super cold here in January and it was about 4 inches long but thin like a pencil. Apparently it still tasted great, though, because it was gone before I could turn around twice. When we had two weeks of -18°C weather, the tops of the carrots froze off to pretty much nothing. So I figured that was the end of them. But as it turns out, they are starting to sprout again and I’m no carrot expert but maybe they will still make something of themselves. Yesterday, I pulled some tiny leaves up this was on the end:

The world’s smallest carrot. Is that not precious?

By the way, if you’re feeling hungry, go check out the Celeriac, Potato & Leek Soup recipe that Deb shared over at Music of Rain! It sounds delicious. 🙂

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