Strawberry Hill

So Dara says "how many strawberry patches do we need?" My answer "all of them".

I am getting good at turning over sod. I put a bag of compost on top of the over-turned grass.

I bought these strawberry flats on clearance at the local big box store for $1.00 a piece. 

I am a sucker for a deal.

Here is the oddly focused finished product. We now have one large strawberry hill a very long strip of strawberries and this smaller hill. And yes, we need more!

Operation "kill a bunch of grass and plant corn"

Disclaimer: I have been lazy with the pics lately. 

I have been using my cell phone camera mostly because I keep forgetting to grab my good camera. So the pics recently have not been edited in Photoshop like normal. =) 

I put this tarp down with mike's help about a month and a half, almost two months ago. 

This appears to be the perfect amount of time to kill everything under it. I never checked the progress so I am not sure if I could have pulled it earlier. The next time I do this I will check more frequently. 

At first I tried to rake the dead grass but that took to much time and energy. I decided to pull the weed-whacker out and make short work of the grass. 

Here is what it looked like after I weed-whacked it. I raked all the dead grass into a pile and put it back down as mulch after we planted everything.

This complex system consisted of two sticks and a piece of string. I used a tape measure and a drum stick to make the holes for the corn at the correct depth and spacing. We planted marigolds at the ends of each row to mark the rows. Dara planted butternut squash, spaghetti squash and two varieties of watermelon in between the rows. This allows us to grow more food in a smaller footprint while the squash and watermelon leaves will keep the weeds at bay. I will post more pics as the plants come up.

Hey, I mean Hay!

So I bought some hay. Actually it is straw, but that doesn't have a nerdy pun I can think of.

Dara and I pushed the bale out of the truck and it landed pretty much where I wanted it. Which is good because that is not going anywhere now.

This is one of the reasons I got the straw. I will pull straw from the back to put down in the garden between the raised beds. A post will be coming soon when I do that. I swear those were my first three arrows from 25 yards. 

This is project "kill a bunch of grass and plant corn".  Soon I will move this tarp that has been down for a month and a half, and plant three kinds of corn in the block where the grass was. In the background you can see the squash and beans I planted along the fence line.