A new strawberry bed

I've been faithfully collecting a few boxes a day from my work and sheet mulching the last uncultivated section of my allotment with them.  Unlike last winter, where I didn't have enough organic matter to put on top and had to leave the cardboard bare, weighted down by bricks and bits of pallet wood--I've got these all covered tidily with wood chips, scavenged from the communal waste.

I got hold of my neighbor who previously promised me some extra strawberry plants from her big bed, and we made a date for me to collect them.  In exchange I brought her some homemade oatmeal cookies--and a box of partly composted chicken bedding (manure and straw) to put on her strawberry bed after we pillaged it.

So the husband and I brought them to the allotment and transplanted around 30 in the sheet mulch.  The weeds underneath won't be dead yet, so we just put some of that chicken bedding mixed with sand and planted in that, and tucked the wood chips around to keep the moisture in.  They'll need watering regularly for a while I think.  And hopefully next year we'll have lots of plants and berries of our own.

(We've already been twice to the pick your own farm and brought home 15+ kilos of strawberries for freezing, drying, and gorging on fresh;  we might go back one more time too.)

Strawberry chips, July 2019