I planned and I planned and I planned and I planned my garden all autumn and winter…and woke up in the early Spring to realize I’d completely forgotten my favorite fruit…strawberries.
With a dog who likes to poop on plants and ducks who like to snuggle up in them (and yep, poop in them as well), and a front yard that has been designated Drought Tolerant, I had to find a place for these in our backyard that gave them full sun, kept them out of the way, and were NOT in one of those faux wine barrel planters (no offense, I just dislike them to an extreme). I also was trying to figure out a way to pot them up without buying a new pot.
Enter this long narrow brown planter that I’d long used in the past as a space saving Duck Waterer for their old coop. I’d left the planter’s existing plugs in since it held their water, and had just looked through it up on the shelf in the garage. It was around that same time that I was going through my garden ‘accessories’ - cloth scraps used for ties, garden staples nearly rusted out from reuse, and hooks I’d used for my hanging cedar planters I’d built back at our Emerald City cottage to attach the to the wall. With a bit of leftover gray paint to match the trim on our house, drilling a few holes and connecting the hooks to some eye hole screws I had lying around...VOILA! These are now mounted on our only South-facing wall in the backyard, with some pretty pesticide-free strawberry starts to act as my test subjects.
(Obviously this isn’t even CLOSE to producing how many strawberries I like to freeze and make into jam, etc., so I’ll still be hitting up the farm stands for a bunch later this spring and early summer, but it will at least provide a few snacks until I can get my act together for an entire bed of them next year! That being said when we had our farm, I had a 50 s.f. dedicated bed…and it still wasn’t enough hahaha...).
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