You eyes are not deceiving  you, we put a long groove in each of our future rows of strawberries.

Have we lost our minds?

At this point in the project, I thought maybe we had : ).

If  you read my last post, you know that the big project was starting a strawberry patch with a plastic mulch system. This works by, making a 2 foot wide mound of dirt and as long as you want to make your row. You cover the row with plastic, cause the plastic keeps the dirt warm and then you cut holes in the plastic and plant your strawberry plugs. When I did my research it did not sound too bad…..that is yet to be seen haha…

The one thing you have to think about is, that if you put plastic over the rows, you have to water the strawberry plugs somehow.

That is where drip lines come into play.

We installed a drip line that was 60 feet long and bury them a little below ground so we could water the strawberries.

The drip lines come in 50 foot lengths, so we had to add several feet on to each line. You use this barb looking plastic inserts that connect the two lines.

One end of the drip line is connected to a water hose and the other end is tied off using this doodad. Forgot the name of it, but it bends the drip line prevented the water from going out that end.

On the other end that connects to the water hose, you have to connect each drip line to this faucet set up. This one has enough hooks up for four drip lines. We also put these faucet connects on the end of the drip line to connect it to the faucet set up. Then you just connect your water hose from your hose and turn it on to water the strawberries. Cool uh? : )

Here is a picture of all the installed drip lines before we buried them in. After we buried the drip lines, we started on the plastic.

Now we unrolled the plastic and cut it to length. Then we unfolded it and cut  it into the width we needed.

Here is what two of the rows looked like. You take landscape hooks and hook the plastic into the ground so it does not blow off. This is as far as we got one night. When I came the next day, I brought oldest grand girl to help plant the strawberries. It was then I realized we did not put our fertilizer on top of the dirt rows before we put the plastic down. So, before we could go any further, we had to take the plastic up on one side and sprinkle the fertilizer down and then re-stake the plastic. ugh!!!

Here is what the rows looked like after we covered each row with plastic.

Step two is done with our strawberry project.

Tomorrow, I will tell you how we managed to get all those strawberry plugs planted. Let’s just say, we had to cut 250 round little holes in the plastic to be able to plant to the plugs in the ground.

Oh my…what have I got ourselves into….

That is the question of the day : ).

Becky