OLD-FASHIONED COMPANION PLANTING

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Once your asparagus has grown tall enough that you've filled the trenches level, plant strawberries a foot apart down the center of the open strips between asparagus plants. Cut the raffia holding plants in bundles, remove dead and discolored leaves, and put the plants in a bucket of warm water. In the garden, dig a fan-shaped slit in the ground. You'll find that a new berry plant has a crown of leaves, a firm, grape-sized bud, and a bunch of small roots growing down from the bud. Spread plant's roots out in a fan shape and insert them into the slit so that all roots are covered but just the bottom of the bud is underground. If planted too deep, the bud will suffocate. If planted so shallow the tops of roots are exposed, they will dry out and the plant will die. Press soil very firmly around roots. Make a small rain-holding saucer in the soil around each plant and water well with a weak solution of liquid fertilizer and tepid water. Mulch with straw, weed-free hay, or other loose organic material and keep soil moist till plants are bushy with new leaves.

The strawberry plants will try to fruit, but don't let 'em. To force energy into root storage for a bumper crop next season, pinch off first-year flowers as soon as the little sprays of blossoms sprout. Each plant will also put out runners that will grow new plants at every node—resulting in a mat of new plants that will all fruit the next year. Left alone, in two years or three, a berry bed will become a thick mass of plants that produces few berries. In small plantings, you can be picky and guide and prune runners and thin plants. I find it easiest to let them go wild, but each fall I take out every other 2'-wide row (starting with the original parent plants the fall of their fruiting year; the next year taking out their offspring in the rows to each side of the originals and so on, alternating every year). Though it sounds wasteful, this is the best way to have good strawberry crops year after year. Rototill the soil in a good 18"-wide band even if a lot of berry plants are jerked on still-strong runners from the fruiting beds to each side. Plants remaining will have the bare ground to flower, fruit bountifully, and fill the bare strips with vital new plants next year.

Set rhubarb root divisions into the soil so that the tops of crowns are just visible. Place them two feet apart in all directions. Don't cut any stalks the first year. Next year, pull (don't cut, pull off from the base) only a few large, fat stalks. Thereafter, you can pull fully grown fat stalks till the June strawberries are gone by. The large leaves are mildly toxic, so snap them off and leave them to compost down around the parent plant. They go flat and make a good weed deterring mulch.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print