Last year I started to redo the strawberry bed which was in a raised bed covered by a frame of netting which did a great job of keeping the mice out. For the first time in ages we got to eat strawberries instead of the mice getting there first, the netting had done a great job. The only problem was the plants had no room to grow upwards and so as the summer went on and the strawberry plants grew, they soon hit the netting and stopped. Some areas turned into a bit of a mouldy mess of trapped leaves and strawberries trying to reach out but prevented from doing so from the successful netting.

The simple solution may had been to add another layer of decking and raise the walls of the bed but keep the soil level at it was. For some reason I didn’t fancy doing that, maybe I thought I didn’t have enough decking wood left over which may have been the case. Instead, I decided to dig down and so a multi-month task started. First digging out and saving the top soil and then digging the lower soil to create a hole that would eventually cover the complete bed. I then put the top soil back in and replanted the strawberry plants. I wasn’t really digging into the sub-soil as this was a raised bed, it was just the ground level soil under all that, but it was a lot more compact.

I did a small bit every other week and this week it was all complete. The level is now a lot lower and hopefully low enough to let the plants grow upwards as they would like, I’m not totally convinced. Either way, it’s nice to finally get it finished. It needed to be finished too as it’s now spring time and plants are starting to show life once again.

Meanwhile, the purple sprouting has not done well for us this year, a shame as we normally harvest and eat a lot of it around this time of the year. I didn’t net them properly and so it is my own fault. Between caterpillars and pigeons everyone has gained from the plants apart from us. Still, there were some small growths which I picked. I removed the netting, for what it was, in order to make room for two rows of parsnips. I hoed in some rotted down horse manure, gave everything a rake and sowed the parsnips with radish seed markers every foot or so. The markers will tell me where the parsnips will be. I used old radish seed as it’s a good way to use it up, plus these markers will end up edible which is all good.

I wanted to get the parsnips sown this week as the weather has been warm and dry whereas it is meant to turn warm’ish but wet over the coming days. I covered the bed with fleece, mostly to keep the wind off. Each year the fleece gets more and more tired with rips and stains, but it’s still fine for this.

I cleared off a bit more weed and mess along the fence. I also started to take apart some of the long lengths of Dexion. It will take a while as it’s been underground for years and very much rusted in place, but slowly the bolts are coming out. They will all have to come out within the next couple of weeks as the ground they are laying on will be planted up with seed potatoes soon.