Why I Oughta...

If you buy strawberry plants once, you'll have strawberries for years, they say.  We started with container-grown bareroot strawberry plants in 2018 .  And, guess what?  They ESCAPED.  Now, we have Strawberry groundcover in one of our beds.   Back in 2019 - I called them 'volunteer' strawberries and thought it was cute.  But, they they spread.  And spread.  I ripped some out.  They came back.  I ripped out more.  They came back . But, we haven't eaten any of the strawberries in the years since they grew in 2019.  2020, 2021, 2022 were all strawberry-free years.  Why?  Well...we did *grow* strawberries.  But, they were gobbled up by the critters.  This year, however is different. In addition to leaving the strawberry groundcover in place, I also dug out eight plants and put them in our vertical Greenstalk tower.  After a period of transplant shock, they stabilized and began to throw off strawberries...

Above is a look at the four boxwoods that are planted right outside of our Kitchen windows next to the foundation.  I last posted a photo of these four shrubs back in April of this year when I was taking off the Winter Burn from them and shaping them a little bit.   They've really grown quite a bit and green'd up on their tips in a nice way. A lot of boxwoods in our neighborhood took hard hits from Winter Burn this past Winter - including a few of ours in front - but these seem to have totally recovered nicely.  The two in front are now larger than the two in back.  I was initially thinking of clipping these into nicely shaped orbs, but now that I've seen the Jacques Wirtz-inspired hedge of boxwoods outside of the Fedex World Headquarters , I'm thinking I can grow these together and make a more cloud-like shape out of all four of them.  The other thing to note in this [ Garden Diary ] post is the other plant in the photo.  No...it isn't a weed....

Last year, I planted ten tiny bare root strawberry plants in containers and placed the two containers outside of our kitchen windows.  I didn't end up getting any fruit and when looking at the containers at the end of the year, it seemed that they were mostly dead and weren't going to come back this Spring.  I took them off to the compost bin earlier this Spring and moved on. But this past weekend, Nat asked me if I could move a strawberry plant that was growing in and around some ornamental grasses.  What strawberry plant, I asked?  And she pointed me to this one.  Turns out, we have a volunteer Strawberry plant that is coming up and flowering.  What a nice surprise, right?  I *do* need to move this, but I'm thinking I should wait for it to go through one season of throwing off whatever tiny berries it might throw off this season, then move it.  This post says to wait until August : If you already have an established bed, you should gen...

In our old garden back in Elmhurst, we had a couple of strawberry plants.  I put them in a giant pot (that came with our Ginko tree) and they came back year-after-year we lived there and bore fruit that we (sometimes) ate and other times were enjoyed by various critters.  Here's a photo showing one of the big fruits from 2013 .  Here's a look at one of that plants just about six years ago and  here's a sample harvest from 2012 .   Also, in 2015, I came across this Hula Berry plant which features strawberries that taste like pineapple.  I planted it, but then before we were able to harvest, we sold our house and moved out.   Fast forward to this year: I found this package of 10 bare root "June Bearing All Star" strawberry plants from M&G Holland.  They sat on my desk for a few weeks until recently when I had the two containers left over from planting the kids Earth Day trees .   I wanted to run a little b...

I have no idea what these are going to turn out like, but I couldn't pass them up.  In this four-pack from Home Depot, they're selling "Hula Berry" plants.  Three white ones, one red one.  The red one produces pollen for the white ones, it seems. They have a Facebook page where they say they're 'going fast' in Chicago , so if you're curious about them like I was and find yourself out and about, head to Home Depot to try to pick up a set. I'm going to plant them out in the garden and see what happens.  I have very little expectations, so if they do, indeed, turn out to taste like pineapple, I'll be pretty amazed.

We've been picking one or two strawberries off our little plants almost every other day the past few weeks.  This morning, I went out and peeked at the blueberry plant and it had some ripe ones that came off the branch so easily. I planted this bush just about a year ago and it started to pay off in this small amount this year.  I had to put a small fence around the bush as it kept getting eaten by rabbits (the bush) and that was causing it some stress.  The berries last year were all picked away by birds, so this year the fence helped big time. Nat wants more, so I'm going to see if I can find another few bushes and plant them - permanently - in the garden.

Earlier this Spring, we moved our Strawberry plant from the center of the main raised bed to a separate, stand-alone pot that could allow it to spread out a bit.  Due to that stress, I'm thinking that I stunted the plant's growth this year as this morning I was able to pull just one - the first! - berry off. Granted, it is a bit early, as last year it wasn't until late June that we were getting a lot of fruit .  Nat and the girls enjoyed this one berry and Nat said it was delicious.  Makes me want to go out and buy a few more plants.  I know it takes multiple seasons for them to start paying off/bearing lots of fruit, so we better get started now to have something by next Summer.