old plot new beds

we have filled our new strawberry bed with strawberries finally! a badger was rooting around in their so i had to net it, but in general it looks like we could have a nice crop of strawberries this year even with these very old plants, i dug up three plants from under the black currents (probably around 8 years old) and their roots were a half inch thick and looked like tree roots (click to enlarge)!

 

meanwhile, just a little bit up the plot i have dug a little bed and put three zucchini plants in, we got these from the farm since our seedlings are late (which is a polite way of saying that we killed them and had to replant, oops), the plan is to get rid of the wood pile between this and the strawberries and do the same there:

 

 

matches

recently matches has been getting used to the warmer weather, he has crafted a lazy throne for himself by sitting on a patch of grass in the back garden (click to enlarge):

 

 what a cat, he sits there all the time! and when he gets thirsty he helps himself to the water in our water lily container ... make yourself at home matches!

 

mulching

one thing that we have been doing a lot of this year is mulching, it kind of goes with the whole straw things, m. has said that we have the only "shaggy" plot in the whole allotment, but i have been paying really close attention to fertilizing and mulching this year, our purple sprouting broccoli look great because of it, and so do our garlic:

although there's a little bit of rust on them the look good, next time we won't plant them so close, but here is a freshly mulched and weeded bed, and some shaggy straw in the background.

a new raised bed

here is the new raised bed that i constructed:

the top of the old plot is really getting tidy now, for this bed the sides are 10 inches high, which is higher then the beds we built last year, this bed leaves that strange empty area open, we will have to figure out a way to fill it, the problem with this space is that it is filled with plastic from trash that was on the plot when we first got it, so raised beds are really the only thing we can do here.

a new compost pile

i built a new compost pile "bay" from some pallets that we collected, we now have a place to but new compost (click to enlarge):

the compost from our two piles is really nice, it will make great mulch and we may use a lot of it on our potatoes ... yummy.

the slope: before and after

well there are a lot of projects that we have completed this spring, the most important of which was to get the plastic weed barrier off the slope in the new plot, since it was breaking down quickly, here is the before picture (click to enlarge):

we have been very serious about getting as much plastic out of our plot as possible, and this was a prime target, but what to replace it with?

the answer is a paper-based weed barrier, which looks like this:

yes, not an attractive color, but it seems to be lasting, it's like we have paper mache-ed out little hill!

that is a monstrous sage plant, btw ...