Strawberry Season Around Corner!

The Crown Hill Community Garden bird house and planting workshop was a huge success! Folks from around the neighborhood prepped the garden beds, weeded, trimmed, and transplanted. Gardener Fred, with help from Randy who manages the garden around the corner at Labateyah, led the kids in an exciting project to build bird houses from scratch. The parents seemed a bit nervous about the hammers and saws but the kids and gardeners created with confidence.

Stop by on Saturday!

Join the gardeners at “The Holman Grove” (the triangle by Petco on 90th and Holman). Help prep this 1-year-old fruit grove. Bring some tools or just bring yourself! Learn about permaculture, hugelkultur, and fruit tree maintenance!

Saturday March 20th

12pm – 3pm

What’s Growing

  • STRAWBERRIES! Swanson’s Nursery donated 24 Albion day neutral plants to the garden two years ago – and now the garden has over 100 plants. They broke these up and spread them across the garden, in the planters by Crown Hill Park, and donated to a sharing garden in Rainier Beach.
  • Parsley – planted last spring. This is its second year! The gardeners look forward to harvesting seeds to share!
  • Lettuce – some planted two months ago, some more recently below the cloches.
  • Chard
  • Garlic
  • Kale
  • Pea
  • Echinacea

Sage Advice

“You can keep sharing strawberry plants forever.”  – Gardener Christal

If You Do One Thing This Week

Break up and spread out your strawberry plants. It’s ok to have a couple together, but if your strawberries are too bunched up, they will shade each other out as they grow.

Tips to break up your strawberry plants:

1- Dig up the whole plant/ root ball.

2- Shake off the dirt to see what is going on.

3- Divide them and put them in a little pot with good soil to develop roots – if they have strong roots, the crows and wind won’t rip them out.

  • If you have a compost pile, place them there for this process. The extra warmth will help them grow strong!

4- Look to see if there are berries growing. Flowers and berries just now starting can stay. Remove little old berries .

Questions about strawberries?

Drop by the garden!
Or contact the Garden Hotline:  help@gardenhotline.org

Mulch Now to Ease Summer Watering!

In general, you want to leave your mulch on. Bare soil hemorrhages water and nutrients. Lay or leave mulch where you aren’t planting, and between rows. Some mulch however contains diseases, and should be removed. Now is a good time before the buds break on blueberry branches, to rake old mulch away from blueberry plants and put new mulch down, this helps remove the fungus that causes mummy berry in blueberries.

Chop & Drop – when you pick that spring lettuce or herb, pull out the whole thing, take the parts you want, and leave the rest to act as a mulch.