Salty Sam’s Fun Blog for Children
Number 442
Planting Strawberries
Hello Everyone
Bill and Bob and Emily all love strawberries and Auntie Alice said that she would plant some more plants out to keep up with demand.
Late summer is the time of year to plant out strawberry plants.
They do last a few years but get old eventually and need to be replaced.
Strawberry plants are prone to virus diseases that reduce crops and so if you want to buy some plants to make up your own bed; it is a good idea to buy plants that are from certified, virus-free stock.
A strawberry bed needs to be well-prepared before putting any plants out into it.
You need to first, clear weeds away and add compost from the compost heap to give your plants lots of food and a soft bed to grow their roots in.
Put your plants out as soon as you buy them; spacing them 30cm apart.
Plant them in rows 90cm apart.
Dig a hole with a trowel, put the plant in the hole, backfill the soil and press firmly in – use your foot if your hands are only little and not very strong.
Water your new strawberry plants with a fine spray of water to settle them in to their new home.
Next year, in mid-summer you can make new extra plants to extend a bed or replace old plants that are not cropping so well anymore.
Strawberry plants naturally produce runners. These are stems that run along the ground and will, at certain places, start to root.
The botanical name for a runner is a stolon.
These creeping stolons will produce two of three new plantlets along their length. The plantlet nearest to the parent is the strongest so is the one to keep.
Select the strongest most vigorous runners for propagation and remove the rest. Spread the runners evenly around the plant and anchor them down with a stone or two-pronged, metal peg pushed into the soil.
When the plants are rooted, you can transfer them by trowel to another place where they will have more room to grow.
Otherwise you could put a plantlet into a pot filled with compost and half bury this pot into the surface of the strawberry bed until the plantlet has rooted.
Then the plantlet can be cut from the parent plant.
The method using the pot ensures that the roots are disturbed less when the new plant is transferred to its new growing position.
The pots you use can be clay or plastic, they can be filled with soil from the garden. When they are buried, it is not possible for them to be knocked over in the wind.
They should be watered so that the compost in the pot never dries out – so keep an eye on them and look after your new plants well.
lf the strawberry runners are not kept for propagation, they should be cleared away because they will create a tangle of stems that will make weeding very difficult.
Strawberry plants produce pretty, white flowers and when these are pollinated they turn into strawberries. Strawberries are covered in seeds and these too can turn into new plants.
Just before strawberries grow big and turn red it is traditional to put straw down between the rows of plants so that the berries don’t touch the wet earth and rot. Nowadays, farmers with big fields to look after, use black polythene or fibre sheets to do the same job.
Birds like eating strawberries too so if you have only a small bed you may want to stretch netting tightly over garden canes to cordon off the area. You need to make a kind of cage to keep them away from your fruit.
But it is really important to make sure the netting is really tight because if a bird gets tangled up in loose netting, it will get badly injured.
Traditionally after the plants finished fruiting, the straw would be set alight in order to get rid of pests and diseases.
This is not done anymore because it is too dangerous!
Outside strawberry leaves should be clipped away – but be careful to leave the centres of the plants with all the new growth.
These old leaves can be raked up with the straw you have used to protect your berries.
So if you want to try your hand at growing strawberries, l wish you good luck and don’t forget to start collecting lots of recipes to try out with your harvest.
Yum, yum!
lf you like my blog, please support it by telling all your friends and followers about it.
Thank you!
And see you again next Fun Friday!
Love and kisses
Salty Sam
www.christina-sinclair.com
Bill and Bob’s Joke of the Week
Bill: That girl says she recognizes you from the vegetarian club.
Bob: l don’t think so. l don’t think l have ever met herbivore.
Salty Sam © Christina Sinclair 2015
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of material from this blog without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited.
Links may be used to www.christina-sinclair.com
Picture Gallery
THE SALTY SAM NEWS DESK
Every weekend, peace reigns in Bill and Bob’s house so that their dad can concentrate on all the things he has to learn.
He is studying to be an accountant.
Bill and Bob’s mum is doing all the housework and laundry so that he has all his time to study and relax when he is not at work; but she is learning too. She is learning about how to set up a business. She is learning about retail tricks of the trade – that means how to be good at selling things.
She learns things from books and the Internet.
She is learning about displaying items in a shop so that they look nice.
She has been collecting items like old wooden boxes and scrubbing them down and painting them with stencil work to make them look more attractive.
She has been collecting large baskets and shelves too and anything else she thinks she can re-purpose to use in the shop. Any money she can save will help.
Bill and Bob’s mum and dad sat down one evening and looked at their finances and looked at exactly where all their money went.
Sometimes when you do this, what you discover can be a bit of a surprise!
Doing this might help you to find out where you can save some money.
They calculated how much they spent on petrol every week and knew that that wasn’t an expense they would have anymore if they worked locally.
Bill and Bob’s dad decided to swap his car for a smaller one that would be cheaper to run.
Bill and Bob’s mum would be able to walk to work in future.
She was going to run her shop with five of her friends. Two of them would be in the back part of the shop giving beauty treatments.
She was looking forward to being able to talk to her customers. It would be more interesting than the job she has now, she thought.
She wants a new challenge in life.
She wants to spend more time with her children.
She was giving a lot of thought to designing the shop to make it look attractive.
Artwork would be displayed in the front of the shop and the beauty salon.
There would be scented candles and things for the bath wrapped up in gift boxes.
Local artists would get some money if a piece of art or painting was sold and the shop would get some too. The shop would be what is called an outlet.
She and her friends would take it in turns to be in the shop so that it could be open every day of the week in the summer at the very height of the tourist season and six days a week in the winter with shorter opening hours.
The beauty salon would be shut on Sundays.
They would create something called a roster. This means a timetable to show when everyone would be working in the shop so that everyone had a turn at working different days of the week.
Bill and Bob’s dad would do the books – that means look at how the money was being spent and made and see what in the shop was selling well and what wasn’t and how much money each kind of thing was making.
The beauty salon and the shop would share paying the rent for the property.
Everyone will take home food if it is coming near its sell by date so that it will not be wasted.
Bill and Bob thought it was all very interesting.
*********************
TO ADVERTISE ON THIS BLOG
PLEASE CONTACT:
christina.sinclair.ads@aol.co.uk
*********************
Quick Quiz
Can you rearrange these muddled letters to find the names of things found in a garden?
- gniws
- dlise
- gatufrice
- nishawiglen
- denusb
- chedairck
- yantlpet
- chubbtarith
- nagesrdohe
- klerrinsp
lt’s the Weekend!
HOW TO MAKE HOLlDAY CLOTHES FOR CHARACTER DOLLS
The patterns for the dolls are on Blog Post 427 along with their school uniforms.
BOY’S SHORTS (KNIT TWO)
Using 4mm knitting needles and orange dk yarn cast on 14 stitches
Knit 2 rows of garter stitch
Knit 6 rows of stocking stitch
Decrease 1 stitch at the beginning of the next 2 rows of stocking stitch
Knit 2 rows of stocking stitch
Knit 4 rows of garter stitch
Cast off
TO MAKE UP
Using over-sew stitching and with right sides together sew up top of trousers and inside leg seams
GIRL’S SHORTS (KNIT TWO)
Using 4mm knitting needles and green dk yarn cast on 14 stitches
Knit 2 rows of garter stitch
Knit 2 rows of stocking stitch
Decrease 1 stitch at the beginning of the next 2 rows of stocking stitch
Knit 2 rows of stocking stitch
Knit 4 rows of garter stitch
Cast off
TO MAKE UP
Using over-sew stitching and with right sides together sew up top of trousers and inside leg seams
TOP FRONT AND BACK (KNIT TWO)
Using 4mm knitting needles and white dk yarn cast on 11 stitches
Knit 2 rows of garter stitch
Knit 8 rows of stocking stitch
Knit 2 rows of garter stitch
Cast off
BOY’S SLEEVES (KNIT TWO)
Using 4mm knitting needles and orange dk yarn cast on 12 stitches
Knit 2 rows of garter stitch
Change to white dk yarn
Knit 2 rows of stocking stitch
Cast off
GIRL’S SLEEVES (KNIT TWO)
Using 4mm knitting needles and white dk yarn cast on 4 stitches
Knit 18 rows of garter stitch
Cast off
TO MAKE UP
Using over-sew stitching and with right sides together sew shoulder seams
Sew the tops of sleeves to shoulders
Sew up the under arm seams
Sew up side seams
Please note that the material on this blog is for personal use and for use in classrooms only.
It is a copyright infringement and, therefore, illegal under international law to sell items made with these patterns.
Use of the toys and projects is at your own risk.
©Christina Sinclair Designs 2015
Quick Quiz Answers
- swing
- slide
- fruit cage
- washing line
- sun bed
- deckchair
- play tent
- rabbit hutch
- garden hose
- sprinkler
