Scales and Strawberries

I read another garden blog the other day. This blogger is weighing her harvest this year. I kind of like that idea. I am a numbers guy. I believe in goals and accountability. Sure - let's weigh the harvest. We have a baby scale just collecting dust in the basement, which should work just fine. This morning I harvested 1/2 pound of kale and asparagus. I'll estimate the other 4 harvests at 1/4 pound each. So lets say so far I have 1 1/2 pounds of produce. Fine start for early April. Since I haven't weighed my food since Thanksgiving 1997, I have no idea what kind of poundage to estimate for our year's harvest, so I'll refrain.

Just as a the sun rose this morning, I headed out in the yard to work in the strawberry patch. This patch has been a real struggle for me. It occupies one of our few very sunny spots of yard, but it is on a steep hill, hidden behind a thick hedge of private. It is also on top of a 30 foot wall with no fence or handrail to keep me from plummeting to my death, should I tug a weed a little to hard. Are you getting the idea why this section of yard has been tough for us to figure out? Before we moved in this section of yard was just a weed festival. The previous owner mowed it about once a month with a weed whacker. I did that the first year myself. But as our only truly sunny spot, I just refuse to waste this yard. It is also visible from the street, so allowing weeds to fester is just plain bad for neighbor relations. Last year I ordered about 150 strawberry roots from two different nurseries. It was a fiasco. They were crappy to begin with, then I couldn't get them in the ground right away, so I lost a ton of them. When I finally got around to planting them, it was a struggle. The weeds just overtook the tiny little plants so quickly. Anyway - no crying over rotted strawberries. This is the first time I have looked at the berries this spring. About 50 remain alive. I composted them, consolidated them and spread hardwood mulch around them. The ones that lived look just fine. I expect we'll get some berries this year. But I still don't think this is the permanent final solution for this section of yard. I'm sure we'll struggle with this for years.

Picked up a 1/2 yard of hardwood mulch today and spread it in various spots including the Koi pond, strawberry patch and shed wall.

I cut a river barrel in half today. It had a strong odor of oil, and I wasn't able to clean it out well enough to make it into a rain barrel. So I cut it in half and made a big garden basket out of one half of it. It holds about 10 five gallon buckets of mulch, compost, brush - you name it. It works pretty well, but can get to be very heavy filled with mulch.