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No, it's not quite time to put the strawberry patch to bed for the winter yet, but Katie (her blog is here) asked me a couple of days ago if I would go over how we prepare our strawberries for winter.
The first step toward happy, healthy strawberry plants for next year is a buzz cut. I know this isn't a highly recommended method you might read about, but it's worked really well for me.
Let me digress for a bit. Half of my berry patch (the whole patch is approximately 16' x 16' and contains around 130-140 plants) is going into its fifth year and the other half is going into its seventh year. These are the original mother plants I put in that many years ago. I always cut off any and all runners the main plant sends out. I know letting the runners grow and either going to a matted row system or transplanting the "babies" to another location is a way to expand and/or get "free" strawberry plants. However, I believe letting the mother plant send out runners weakens the main plant and causes it to produce fewer and smaller berries and have a shorter life span so you have to replace your plants sooner. Also, it's been my experience that plants propagated from runners are never as strong as a mother plant.
I was disappointed in my strawberry crop this year in that the berries were smaller than usual and the season was very short. At first I gave myself several hand slaps to the forehead thinking, "Well, you dummy, you pushed those wonderful, loyal plants too far. What do you expect from plants that old?" But then! I heard reports from the two pick-your-own strawberry farms not far from us in Canada. They had exactly the same kind of berry crop I did this year. Now I'm thinking it was our weird spring and summer weather so I'm going to give my plants another year to see what they do before pulling them out and starting a new bed.
But back to the hair cut. Every year, about two weeks after the plants stop bearing, my hubby takes the lawn mower and mows down every single plant being careful not to have the blades set so low that the actual crown of the plant is damaged. His mowing leaves about a 1" high stubble on the plants.
Then the plants have time to re-grow healthy, new foliage (the above picture is what they look like today) before frost hits and they start to die back.
After about the second hard frost we get, we cover the whole patch with either old hay or straw to a depth of about 12". The mulch will settle quite a bit so it's important to pile it on thickly. This mulch isn't so much to protect the plants from the cold as to keep them from partially thawing on bright, sunny winter days and then freezing over night. It's the continued thawing and freezing that will cause the plants to heave up out of the ground and eventually die.
Up here in northern Minnesota, spring takes its own sweet time in arriving so we wait until we're pretty sure we're past any hard freezes before we uncover the strawberry plants for their growing season. That date is usually sometime in May.
Hope some of this helps you, Katie. You're quite a bit south of us, more in a climate we were when we lived in Illinois, but I followed the same routine when we gardened there.
Who can figure out the story on this one?
This morning when we looked into the poultry yard to see if the six Canadian Geese were still there . . .
. . . only one goose was left. Still (in early afternoon) nary a sign of the other five.
This goose seems to be in good shape and not injured. S/he was able to fly in with the others earlier this week. Why was this one left behind when the other five left?
For the past few days, we've had six wild Canadian Geese staying with us in the poultry pasture.
In the past some have set down on the pond for a quick rest now and then but we've never had any stay as long as these have.
Unlike the wild Mallard ducks we frequently have, these guys don't seem the least bit interested in scattered grain. They are grazing machines chowing down almost constantly on the thick grass still ample in the pasture.
I'm pretty sure they must be stoking up for the flight south and we'll wake up some morning soon to see them gone. We'll miss them. Our domestic geese? Probably not so much. They've tolerated the visitors but will occasionally give them a half-hearted, hissing charge so they know who owns the place.
The lowest our thermometer showed was 38 degrees early this morning but there is white stuff that suspiciously resembles frost on a couple of our outbuilding roofs. As far as I can tell, nothing settled on the garden.
Looks to be a lovely, sunny, although cooler day, but rain is forecast for almost all the rest of the week. If that happens, it will be welcomed as we are very dry and forest fires (nothing serious in our immediate area so far) have been popping up all over. I'm grateful we got adequate moisture for the garden growing season but it's not good to be so dry in the fall when all the trees and underbrush are losing their moisture content.
I don't watch many movies. A couple of days ago I was in our library and saw the book, "Albert Nobbs," and considered checking it out. But then I spied the movie of the same name in the DVD section so I opted to take that. After dinner last night, I sat down to watch it.
Oh. My. Gosh.
The story is not a pleasant one; it's a raw tale of the servant class in Dublin, Ireland, in the 1800s. But the acting is knock-your-socks-off fantastic! Glenn Close and Janet McTeer were, in my estimation, magnificent. I don't know if the makeup artists for the movie won any awards, but they should have. I had never heard of Janet McTeer before so Googled her and was amazed to see she is a beautiful woman. Nothing you would ever suspect from her physical presence in the movie. If you find yourself in a mood for a movie that isn't light and fluffy and funny (my usual selection), watch "Albert Nobbs."
I had planned on spending most of the day today outside doing more yard and garden clean-up but a sore throat kept me from sleeping soundly last night. I had an inkling all day yesterday that some germies were trying to get a grip on me and that seems to have materialized. Dang. (Where the heck did I pick up this sore throat?) Well, I'm tougher than any ol' little germ so if I can keep a sensible (ha!) mindset, I'll lay low today, hit the homeopathic remedies, make sure a lot of liquid flushes through my whole system and do what I can to soothe my throat. Right now I feel like somebody has stolen every ounce of energy from my body. Is it permissible to get back into your jammies at 10:30 in the morning?
I've not done much blogging these last couple of days, maybe because not too much noteworthy has been going on around here.
That's not to say we've been napping a lot and stuffing ourselves with caramel corn. (Okay, so I DID make two double batches of caramel corn. Hey, it's the perfect time of year for it, right?)
We really have been getting things accomplished.
One thing that's been happening is the sorting out of areas that have been too much of a mumble-jumbled mess for too long. De-cluttering, if you will. That's the aim anyway. How much headway we'll continue to make (and there is a LOT of headway still to be made) along those lines remains to be seen. But we have been working at it.
While trying to bring organization to the disorganization, deciding what to toss and what to keep, figuring out what to put where for a better way of storing it, we've found we're a pretty good working team.
My hubby has plans and ideas that would never occur to me. He's truly an idea man. He can come up with a "good" reason for keeping anything. I'm the practical, down-to-earth one who sees more clearly that we can't do everything each of us professes to want to do. He's always ready to think outside the box and I can see what is realistically possible and what is not. (He's fond of referring to me as his anchor. But I'm not at all sure he means it in the most complimentary way.)
I like to think that we each have our strong points and by working together and respecting each other, we're making some changes that will benefit both of us more than if we just did everything his way or my way.
"We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts."
- Madeleine L'Engle
