Our family eats a lot of berries in a year. Smoothies, yogurt with berries, berries with brownies and whip cream, strawberry shortcake, sugar free strawberry jam. And that doesn’t count the plain ones eaten as a snack or for breakfast.
Mainly we eat TONS of strawberries but we love blueberries and raspberries as well. So last year our big spring garden project was building square foot garden strawberry beds.
Since it was the first year we didn’t get many berries. Like 4. We put in 56 plants so we should be getting a HUGE amount of berries this year! Don't those beds looks nice and neat? Well they don't look like that anymore.
The plants filled in wonderfully. But sadly we have a bunch of clean up chores this spring. One of those chores is to clean up the berry patch.
BERRY PATCH DREAM
I would be thrilled if I did not need to buy ANY berries to freeze this year. It’s my dream to pick our own organic pesticide free berries.
I am anxiously awaiting the blooms on all of our plants. We have a quite a few new plants that “escaped” the beds as runners.
After digging them up I will be moving them to pots to give away to friends. But next year I’d like to sell all those new little plants developing from the runners.
There’s lots of space around the berry boxes so after the clean up is finished I want to plant wildflowers. That way the weeds will have some competition!
Clean up process
As you can see from the picture, we’ve got some work cut out for us.
The raspberry plants are getting smothered by patches of grass plus the strawberry beds need to be tidied as well.
Here’s my plan for my cleanup process.
- Weed eat the grass to the ground. Pour vinegar on the dandelion plants.
- Lay black plastic around each raspberry plant. Its hard to weed eat around without cutting them down and then grass grows up. This will prevent that problem next year (I hope).
- Lay a bed of mulch in the walking paths to keep weeds to a minimum.
- Lay a thick layer of mulch in one corner and then move hay on top of it. (for use in the fall)
- Plant more raspberry plants if I can find them.
- Pot baby strawberry plants and give them away!
- Plant wildflower seeds!
- Enjoy the pretty berry patch!
Do you have a berry patch? Please share your spring cleanup tips in the comments!
