Planting Strawberries

An extremely kind fellow blogger gave away this nifty dibble handmade by her husband  of Bepasgarden, on her blog and I was just looking through my posts and realized that I have never blogged about it or how really handy it is.  I used it a few months ago when I planted my strawberry plants and it was the perfect tool for the job and looked good too.  I plant my berries in a 3’X6’ raised bed.  I dig small trenches between the rows and plant 2 rows with alternate placement of the plants to give them the most room to spread.  I have 3 rows of berries in this bed with 2 trenches that I use to deep water the roots.  I fill each trench with water then lightly sprinkle over head.  The berries I planted in this bed were bought bare root and are a fairly new variety called Sweet Ann.  The were breed in our area by Lassen Canyon Nursery.  It is a day neutral variety which means that it will continue to bear fruit all summer until frost.  It is suppose to produce a very large and very sweet berry.  Can’t wait to compare it to my favorite from last year called Mara de Bois, which was the best berry I have ever tasted.  I now have 2 beds of Mara and one of Sweet Ann. 

Let the strawberry competition begin!

Update:  Somehow this post never got posted and now I have been eating strawberries from both beds.  So I can tell you that the handy dibble did a great job at helping me to get those roots firmly in the ground and they are now producing lots of lovely berries for me and some for the bugs.