Strawberries

I scrounged strawberry plants from friends and family to start my strawberry bed.  I applied pine needle mulch to make the soil more acidic (mine is slightly alkaline) and supposedly to repress weeds.  Weeds...they are evil.  I weeded most of the bed, but I'm sure you can see where I stopped.

Weeds are pernicious villians of the gardening world. If you accidentally break the vine of say a melon or cucumber.  It's dead as a door nail.  If you pull a weed and leave a tad of the root, it will sprout up with a vengeance.  You water and put covers over your little seedlings and maybe they live.  Weeds flourish in cracks in the cement.  Jump up and down on them; they're fine.  Drought conditions; they're fine.  Are they like the vampires of the plant world??? Sucking the life out of your little babies and harder than heck to kill.  These vampires live in the path.  You know the path that you just have to cover in mulch (like the strawberry bed) to stop the weeds.  Hahahah (add a maniacal tone).  If cement can't kill them and 30 mph winds make every other kind of mulch an airborne missile, what hope do we have???  And it's only May.  My crystal ball tells me, I'm going to give my landscaping gloves a work out this summer.

Enough of my weed diatribe.  Let's get back to something fun.  My scavenged strawberries are flowering and some even have berries!  Yeah, I have actual berries on my plunked-into-the-ground-2-weeks-ago immigrants. 

My strawberries are already sending out runners.  This means that they are very happy and healthy...or they are making a break to try to escape the weeds.  I prefer to think they are very happy in their new home. 

By the way, the pumpkin plant in the wall of water picture on the home page has out grown it's tee-pee of water and is now free to roam the pumpkin bed.