Make An Old-Time Strawberry Barrel

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Get two half-kegs for each strawberry barrel, and mate them rim-to-rim like a clam shell. When it comes time to replenish the soil, you'll find that being able to split the barrel makes the job easier than having to deep-dive into a single cask of any size. While you're at the building center, get a yard or two of rustproof finemesh window screening and a length of perforated plastic leach-field pipe 6" shorter than the barrel will be high once the halves are mated one atop the other—typically 30 inches for a 30-gallon cask. Get the largest-diameter perfpipe you can. It will go down the center of the barrel to drain the soil inside and reduce weight by supplanting center-of-barrel soil that the berry plants wouldn't use.

Reinforcing

The keg halves lack the self-supporting integrity of a whole bent-stave barrel, so get out your electric drill and 3/32" metal-cutting bit and drill through steel hoopstraps and 1/2" into the center of each stave. Insert 3/4" #6 stainless steel roundhead wood screws.

When you pick up the barrel halves from the yard, also get a 5' or 6' length of 1" x 2" red oak or other hardwood. At home, cut the oak into four 8"-long slats with angled ends so they'll fit snugly to the sides of the barrel. Place them inside, on the bottom of each half-keg, perpendicular to the slats that make up the end plugs. Fasten two reinforcing slats to each end plug-angled ends tight against barrel sides, parallel to one another. Use stainless screws.

In the end of the half-barrel that will serve as the bottom, use a saber saw with a long blade to remove a circle of wood a bit larger than the drain pipe is around. In the end of the other that will be the top half, cut out the center leaving only a one-inch-wide lifesaver of top boards in place around the perimeter. (Yes, you may be cutting out some of the cross-braces you installed. But if you hadn't put them in, the half-barrels could have fallen apart at this phase.)

Mark locations for rings of planting holes—one between the rim and the first metal hoop ...the second between the two metal hoops enclosing each barrel half ...a third between bottom hoops if you have a 7-hoop Scotch-whiskey-style aging barrel. Some large-size bisected barrels will have two hoops per half—and some of these will have hoops spaced so that you can drill out two tiers of holes; others will allow only a single tier. Locate holes in every other stave in each tier and stagger holes above the other in adjoining tiers. Then, with a 2" hole-saw on the hand drill (or making circles by drilling a series of smaller holes in a circle), cut out the planting holes. Temporarily stack the halves together as mirror images and drill out another ring of planting holes along the seam—staggered between final rings of holes in each half.

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