soggy donkey herder on Nostr: Anybody want to talk #garden #strawberries with me? This will be my third year with ...
Anybody want to talk #garden #strawberries with me?
This will be my third year with this patch. It was a grass hillside, and I smothered the grass with cardboard and paper mulch and planted a bunch of bare root strawberry plants. They did ok and I learned a lot, but last spring I basically replanted everything. I had to put the plants on mounds, improve some more soil, and lay chicken wire around all the mounds to keep the chickens from digging there. Now we’re at spring #3 and I’m not sure what I should do now.
I’m in the Pacific Northwest, so my main pest is slugs. They seem to live in grass and migrate over to strawberries, so keeping a nice vegetation free moat around the plants helped a lot last year. But now the wood chip mulch is half rotted and sprouting loads of clover through the chicken wire.
I think if I do nothing, the clover and other ground covers will grow thick enough to harbor slugs, and that’s not okay. I can lay down more wood chip mulch, or I can yank the chicken wire and then mulch, but yanking the chicken wire is vastly harder, plus I’ll just need to put chicken wire back down.
Also, my lassiz-faire gardening style means that I have at least a hundred little strawbabies on runners out there in the paths too. I guess at this point they’re weeds too and I’ll mulch over them 😢
Any other ideas? Tips from people who grow strawberries on a slight incline?
This will be my third year with this patch. It was a grass hillside, and I smothered the grass with cardboard and paper mulch and planted a bunch of bare root strawberry plants. They did ok and I learned a lot, but last spring I basically replanted everything. I had to put the plants on mounds, improve some more soil, and lay chicken wire around all the mounds to keep the chickens from digging there. Now we’re at spring #3 and I’m not sure what I should do now.
I’m in the Pacific Northwest, so my main pest is slugs. They seem to live in grass and migrate over to strawberries, so keeping a nice vegetation free moat around the plants helped a lot last year. But now the wood chip mulch is half rotted and sprouting loads of clover through the chicken wire.
I think if I do nothing, the clover and other ground covers will grow thick enough to harbor slugs, and that’s not okay. I can lay down more wood chip mulch, or I can yank the chicken wire and then mulch, but yanking the chicken wire is vastly harder, plus I’ll just need to put chicken wire back down.
Also, my lassiz-faire gardening style means that I have at least a hundred little strawbabies on runners out there in the paths too. I guess at this point they’re weeds too and I’ll mulch over them 😢
Any other ideas? Tips from people who grow strawberries on a slight incline?