Reflections - Strawberry Equinox

Strawberry Plant

Spring equinox morning, after rain hammered the roof all night, I stared through the sliding glass door at puddles on the south garden’s muddy tractor path. “Can we plant strawberries this afternoon?”

Spence picked up Rills and scratched the cat’s chin. “If it dries enough.”

I shifted my gaze to the mottled-gray cloud cover. Would the garden dry at all?

The rumble of a dump truck in the driveway and the phone ringing interrupted my doubts. “This is Kennedy Landscape,” a high-pitched female voice announced over a staticky connection. “We’re here with your gravel.”

We turned out to be she. The diminutive blonde waved a bill, planted her feet solidly on the cement floor porch, and waited for me to write a check. Check exchanged for a receipt, she strode off the porch behind Spence. He walked past the garage and pointed to the dregs of a gravel pile in the old cabin driveway. 

The waif backed the truck and dumped ten tons of gravel with a rolling rumble.

Returning to the house, Spence rubbed his hands and grinned from sideburn to sideburn. “I can spread gravel this afternoon.”

After lunch the temperature rose to a balmy 60° F ( 16° C) despite the clouds. Postponing his gravel work, we squished through the lawn and squelched over the muddy tractor path to the new raised bed. I knelt on one side. Spence knelt on the other and gently eased apart the roots from the Albion everbearing bare root strawberry plants Amazon had delivered. “You remember. Fan the roots out.”

Janet Planting a Strawberry

A red-bellied woodpecker called churr-churr-churr. Deer Creek swashed through the valley. We staggered the plants in rows of two and three. Wet soil turned my blue garden gloves brown and caked the grooves in my knee pads. He worked twice as fast as me, but I didn’t care. I reveled in the fact that I didn’t have to pull a single weed.

When we’d planted all twenty-four of the new plants, Spence rubbed his hands on his jeans. “How adventurous are you feeling?”

Adventurous? Like the mile and a quarter power walk we took Tuesday to replace my lap swim when the pool had closed “until further notice?” Memories of pain, as if ten tons of gravel ground my joints, shot through my hips and knees. Working in the garden for the first time since winter had satisfied my adventurous spirit. “What kind of adventure?”

He stood. “Transplant strawberries from the old bed.”

I exhaled. The new plants only took up twenty-two of the eighty-foot bed. Filling the remaining fifty-eight feet with plants that had sprouted in the old bed made sense. “Sure.” Turning to the old bed behind me, I brushed away fall leaves, scooped a healthy plant with a trowel, and swiveled back to the new bed.

Spence marched to his tractor and grabbed the ear protectors hanging from the lever that raises and lowers his tractor bucket. “This probably goes without saying, but . . .” He held the protectors against his chest in a pensive, if not prayerful, posture.

I sat back on my heels.

Wind bounced a squeaky branch in the woods and blew hair into my face. 

Pushing the hair aside with my forearm so my hand didn’t touch my face, I waited for my his “but.”

“Be careful not to transplant weeds too.” He hopped onto the tractor, started the engine, and drove toward West Creek Road.

Transplant weeds? Yikes! 

Janet Spreading Straw

Weeds, weeds, and more weeds had propelled me to the south garden this afternoon. They had destroyed our old strawberry bed. The cardboard and used-carpet barriers between the ground and potting soil—which Spence had lugged forty-quart bag by forty-quart bag—didn’t stop the thistles, dandelions, or smartweeds. They surfaced and multiplied. Last year I’d yanked fifty weeds for each Albion everbearing strawberry I harvested. And picking one or two berries at a time from June through October, had yielded one quart—enough for my traditional Christmas fruit salad. No pies. No cereal toppings.

Determined to frustrate the weeds like they had frustrated me, I fingered the soil encasing the fringy roots of the strawberry plant I’d dug from the defunct bed. A section of white root from a wild grass had entwined itself in the strawberry’s roots. Fuzzy moss clung to the strawberry’s stem. I pried the hitchhikers loose and lay the plant on the environmentally friendly YellaWood Spence had used to build the new raised bed. He’d worked hours and hours for months and months even though he can’t eat strawberries—too sugary.

Tilling the ground,

Creating the frame,

Spreading landscape cloth.

Hauling 1750 pounds of topsoil—six times,

Shoveling topsoil from pickup to tractor bucket,
Driving bucket-load after bucket-load from garage to garden,

Angling the tractor to dump soil into the bed—not onto the path.

Top dressing with ten waterlogged, forty-quart bags of potting soil,

Raking to break clumps, mix soils, and smooth the surface.

Checking the trowel to make sure no weeds clung to it, I dug a hole in the new bed and tucked the weed-free transplant into the soil.

Thrumming, the tractor returned with a bucketload of gravel. Spence steered off the road, around the apple trees, and past the raised bed to the tractor path. He spread gravel over the muddy path—swish—and smoothed it out with his bucket—crunch.

Rumbles from the township grader—ten times the size of Spence’s tractor—came down the road. Dan, the road master, waved from the glass cab. Out of the drainage ditch, he dug gravel, that he’d spread before the rain, and dumped it—swoosh—into potholes then backed the grader—bang—to pack the gravel into the wet road with the bucket. 

Spence, returning with load after load of gravel, dodged Dan scooping, dumping, and backing.

Thrum-swish-crunch. Rumble-swoosh-bang. I couldn’t hear spring’s melody.

When I’d transplanted my fifty-sixth weed-free strawberry plant, Spence brought a bale of straw in the tractor bucket and parked. Dan drove toward the township building. 

Crows cawed. Robins sang cheer-up, cheerily.

Spencer pulled a section of straw from the bale. “I want to keep the plants warm.” He peeled off a handful of straw and shook it over the raised bed.

Following his lead, I grabbed, separated, and shook. Whipping hair into my face, the wind carried the scent of straw, fragrance of sun-warmed grain in a field. Hopefully, the straw would protect the strawberry plants from the next cold wave so that this summer brought juicy strawberries, not weeds.

Another all night rain fell after the spring equinox. In the morning, I gazed out the sliding glass door. Water ponded and rippled over the new gravel Spence had spread on the tractor path. I scooped Ande into my arms and turned so the cat faced the glass door. “See the new strawberry bed?” Spence’s bed, raised above the tractor path, had stayed intact under its blanket of straw.

Strawberry Bed Covered with Straw