Raspberry raised beds

Finally! A nice sunny day on the weekend. Today was the perfect day to get caught up on some spring gardening tasks. First, following the instructions by Tom @ Tall Clover Farm, I started by pruning the raspberry canes. I took out all the dead wood and trimmed the canes to about 4′ tall. In retrospect, I probably could have thinned the canes out a bit more than I did. Maybe I’ll take a second pass at this tomorrow. I also thoroughly weeded the beds.

Strawberry beds

After the raspberries, I tackled the strawberry beds (well, two of the three beds). Last year, I put in the bed you see at the bottom of the picture. I weeded this bed and cut back the strawberry foliage. Behind this bed, you can see the new strawberry bed. Before planting the new strawberries, I had to fill the bed with soil. Of course, to make this extra fun, I had to wheelbarrow the soil to the bed and the pile of soil is downhill from the bed. So, 10 or so uphill wheelbarrow loads (and one very tired person) later, I had the bed filled and then proceeded to plant the new plants. The third strawberry bed is an old bed that I’m going to neglect this year. We’ll probably get some strawberries from it but I’m not going to put any effort into and we’ll do a total rehab of that bed next year.

(And yes, in the pic above you see my kid making a mud mess out of the freshly planted strawberry bed.)

Weeded garlic bed

Last fall I planted three varieties of garlic. The garlic is looking great, although the weeds were enjoying the soil as much as the garlic, so I weeded this bed as well today. That makes a total of four beds prepped today.

And now, on to the rat (or rats) in the greenhouse. We put a couple of giant rat traps in the greenhouse a few days ago and found a very dead rat in a trap this morning. We’re going to do some more rat-proofing this weekend and will keep the traps in place for the duration.

Sandy