The days are get­ting busier and busier. i can’t believe we’re only one week from plant­i­ng the fields! In the mean­time, we’ve been plant­i­ng the kitchen gar­den and putting in berry patch­es. We ordered 12 rasp­ber­ries plants, 6 black­ber­ry plants and about 60 straw­ber­ry plants. They all came dor­mant and bare-root­ed, wrapped in plas­tic. The rasp­ber­ry and black­ber­ry plants basi­cal­ly looked like lit­tle sticks with roots on them.

It’s nice to have a rea­son to be hap­py about rainy, cloudy days this spring. It’s much bet­ter for the plants  to trans­fer them when it’s wet and over­cast. Luck­i­ly, Tues­day morn­ing, when Mom and I plant­ed the berry patch, was pret­ty gloomy. First, we mea­sured out a spot for them between the dri­ve way and the tilled fields. Our berry patch is 24′ x 9′. We have 3 rows of rasp­ber­ries 6′ apart (4 plants each) and 2 rows of black­ber­ries (3 plants each). Each plant is 3′ apart. We plant­ed them right into the ground, sur­round­ing each bush/stick with a cou­ple good shov­el-fulls of com­post. Next, we took card­board and cov­ered the ground all around the plants to smoth­er the grass and weeds. Mom’s been going to a bike shop and pick­ing up card­board box­es for the last cou­ple of months, so we have a lot of big card­board box­es saved up in the garage. We laid down com­post around the rows of plants and wood-chips (free, from some tree guys that were chip­ping logs up the street) down on the paths.

Card­board, com­post and chips

Then we plant­ed the straw­ber­ry plants in the com­post between the black­ber­ry and rasp­ber­ries bushes.