Garden Bombing and Strawberries

So yesterday Talia and I decided to go over to my parents house and randomly put all the plants into their garden. Over the last couple of weeks my mom has been complaining about having too much house work to do and not enough time. And every time she comes over she has commented on all the plants I have been getting ready to grow and how she hadn't done anything in the garden. Several of these times she has suggested that we come over and do her garden so when I found out that my parents were going to the cottage this weekend I knew I had a chance to do something fun and random.

Saturday afternoon I called my parents as they were heading up to the cottage and asked if I could borrow the car to do some "shopping". I never had any doubt that I could borrow the car so the real purpose of the call was to find out if any work had been done on the garden. As I suspected, nothing. But I did find out that they had started to work on the red ant problem which was good.

Side rant: I tried to call my brother 3 times (and I left a message) to find out when he was around to let me into the house.... Nothing! >.< but it serves him right as I ended up setting the house alarm off at 9:30 Sunday morning and woke everyone up. Unfortunately that also ment waking up my sister who is visiting until Wednesday (Sorry Tanya). I was told she was going to be away with friends all weekend.

Anyway, back to the gardening story. We arrived at my parents house pretty early (9:30) and as I haven't been had to turn on/off the alarm for many years I had completely forgotten the alarm code which rudely woke up everyone. Talia and I looked over the garden and planned out what we wanted to put in. We also asked my brother if there were any plans for specific veggies just in case.

Then it was off to the home depot to get some plants. Sadly, if I had thought of this a couple weeks ago I would have started plants at our place and then we would have paid much less but as it turns out there was a sale on so it didn't cost so much. We managed to get 6 pepper plants (3 different kinds), 6 tomato plants (3 different types), 6 cauliflower, 6 brussel sprouts, 2 bags of sheep manure, 1 pack of green pea seeds, 1 pack of yellow bush bean seeds, 1 pack of spinach seeds (they look weird, kind of like whitish pepper corns), and a pack of little posts to label the garden with.

When we got back we went to work turning the garden over and mixing the manure in. We also rescued some onions in some planters to try and make things look prettier.

First we planted the beans first and then we wanted to transplant the strawberries from their back deep bed into a half of the front deep bed. Unfortunately this is where we encountered more red ants. My parents had been successful in getting rid of the red ants in the bid deep bed but the ENTIRE small deep bed with the strawberries is completely infested. We managed to pull out 12 plants or so and washed them in a big bucket of water to try and get rid of any ants that were on it but that was it. We didn't want to risk encouraging the ants to migrate back into the big deep bed. I did notice something really weird about the ants. They seem to be playing eggs on the strawberry stems. I have never seen ants do that before. You can sort of seem them as little black dots in these pictures.

After the strawberries and beans/peas were planted we moved onto the second large deep bed where we planted the rest of the plants.

The backyard boxes. The small deep bed in hidden in the back to the right of the visible boxes

Strawberries on the left, beans and peas on the right

Side view of the strawberries and beans

There was 1 plant left over from last year that survived. I think it is a chard or something. Along the left side from back to front are the tomatoes and peppers. The right back corner is the brussel sprouts followed by the cauliflower in front of them. The front right corner is where we planted the spinach. The front left corner had the red ants so we left it bare, just in case they hadn't been completely evicted

So that was yesterday. Today most places are closed but we did find out that home depot's garden centre was still open so we decided to go early in the morning to get some strawberries. The original plan was to take some from the deep bed in the back but after getting 12 out we decided we would just go and get some from the store. We picked up 2 big planters of strawberries that each had 8 - 10 plants in them. I also grabbed some biodegradable rope to tie the plants up when they get bigger and a little 3 pronged garden thing to use for the worms. I am hoping I will be able to break up the compost a bit better with it and get some more air flow going.

The strawberries didn't fill the planters completely but we figured that if we leave some spots open for runners then in a couple years we will have lots and lots of berries :)