Strawberry fields forever

When I was writing my last post about the vertical garden, I went to link to the post about my rescuing of the strawberry patch and was kinda disconcerted when I couldn't find it. As it turns out, I didn't get round to writing it, having been distracted by seedlings (which incidentally, are now thriving).

So, here we are - my strawberry patch as it was:

It's... not my finest work.

The problem occurred when I tried to move the strawberries from one end of the garden to another. There was a small strawberry bed in existence when we originally bought the house and, while it was very nice and grew strawberries very well, it had the major disadvantage of being well-known to every ant colony within a mile. As soon as a fruit started ripening, the little buggers were there, lifting it away. A bit of research told me this was a common problem when you had strawberries in the same bed for 4-5 years and that once the ants found where it was, you were better off just killing the bed, and moving your strawberries to a different part of the garden.

Killing the bed proved problematic in itself - I tried every herbicide known to man, dug over the ground dozens of times and still found strawberries trying to grow from everywhere. They grew out of the gravel, they grew across into the next bed, they grew behind the compost heap, they formed an unholy alliance with a raspberry cane and started growing out of that plant - I even found one growing out of a brick. Not growing from dirt that's on a brick mind, literally embedded into the brick itself. I pulled it out and the brick crumbled to dust.

Eventually, after a dosage of herbicide just short of Agent Orange, the damn things died and I left the bed fallow for a year before growing green manure on it and adding a tonne of new compost for it's new incarnation as a brassica bed this year.

Having such a setback made me decide to build a new strawberry bed. Not just a new one, but a better one. A perfect one. I would build a perfect new bed and I would even get some straw to act as mulch and keep the slugs and pests away. So I built the bed, bought the strawberries, laid the straw that I got from a local pet shop...

Yep, that's exactly what it looks like.

Fun fact - pet shop straw is cheaper than horticultural grade straw, but that's because it's only short-term stuff. It's either bedding which'll be changed or food which'll be eaten, so there's no need to worry about what'll happen if you leave it for a while, cause no-one does. Certainly, they don't worry about making sure it's seedless, cause what kind of idiot would use it in a situation where it would sprout and create new straw?

 Who's got two thumbs and just learned a valuable life lesson about false economy? This guy!

So yes, I started growing straw in my strawberry patch and it grew as fast as I could remove it. Unfortunately for the strawberries, towards the end of the season I became a father and rescuing them from the straw invasion became less of a priority. The bed went to rack and ruin and the strawberries, remembering that they once used to be wild creatures that roamed free, decided to strike out for new homes.

The bed was surrounded by concrete, but that didn't stop them. Strawberry runners tried growing into of the fence, in a water trough, in the netting, in a pile of fallen leaves. They tried forming an alliance with next door's blackberry bramble, but were betrayed when that started growing down into their bed and actually succeded in kicking out some of the straw. They tried growing down into the outside drain, which could've ended very badly for all concerned, and I suspect that some of them made it through into my horticulturally-challenged next door neighbour's garden. When they eat through the foundations of his house and declare the independent state of Strawbtopia, I plan on denying all and moving house.

The morass of desperate runners surrounding a bed of sickly looking straw and a rather smug blackberry bramble sat in the corner of my garden for a good few months, always just at the bottom of my to-do list. Every weekend I would announce that I was going to clear out the strawberry bed and every weekend evening I'd come in having found a dozen other chores that needed doing first.

Finally, I knuckled down and spent half a day weeding and clearing out everything that wasn't a strawberry and quite a lot that was. I ended up rescuing about ten small strawberry plants from various places where they'd found a foothold and repotting them for later. Some have made it into the vertical garden as mention and I'll find a use for the others somewhere. Maybe I'll give them away on the blog - virulent strawberry plants, free to a home that doesn't mind accepting them as their unquestioned overlords. No responsibility accepted for any destruction of property and children devoured by our strawberry masters.

PJW