For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.

Our plans for herbs and strawberries have had some rough times!

The Original Plans

Strawberries and herbs are among those things we intend to have as our more perennial food garden items. Most herbs can’t survive as perennials where we lived, but some might, and others will reseed themselves, if left to their own devices. Over time, we plan to use the old kitchen garden as… well… a kitchen garden, since it’s right against the house, so it will eventually have a lot of herbs in it. As for strawberries, these are something we expected to interplant in various areas, as well has having dedicated beds of them.

How it started

Herbs

Last year, we started tried a few herbs, in pots and in the wattle weave bed. We had a single oregano seedling survive, some spearmint, a non-specific thyme variety and lemongrass in pots. In the wattle weave bed, we had chamomile and German Winter thyme.

This year, we started only oregano and German Winter thyme indoors.

None of the oregano germinated.

On removing the mulch in the spring, I had some hope that the thyme in the wattle weave bed had survived, but they did not. So that’s where the new thyme got transplanted.

The chamomile, however, had reseeded itself!

We also have mint in the chimney block retaining wall, which trace back to my late grandmother’s garden, plus chives in one corner of the retaining wall, that come back every year.

Strawberries

We had four strawberry plants in the asparagus bed. They should have spread their runners and expanded by now, but the deer kept eating them. They did, however, survive the winter, and started growing again as soon as the soil warmed up.

The real surprise were the tiny strawberries we grew from seed last and transplanted into the wattle weave bed. As they were planted near the outside edge of the bed, I had some doubt that they would survive the winter, even under the mulch. They not only survived, but they thrived!

This year, I did buy some bare root strawberries, and they got their own bed. You can see how that worked out in this video I made.

Thanks to those elm trees, what started out as a very productive squash hill (the first place we tried growing Crespo squash) was barely recoverable. I could only hope that those layers of cardboard would keep the capillary roots from spreading upwards.

The main thing, though, is that we had some new, everbearing strawberries planted that I hoped would do better here, than the ones by the asparagus did!

How it went

Not too bad, for the most part.

Herbs

The German Winter Thyme did well again, in the same spot we grew them last year. We had the Black Cherry tomatoes growing behind them, and filled in empty spots with Red Wethersfield onion around them. The cats rolled all over the onions, but didn’t roll on the bushier thyme.

The chamomile grew and bloomed, but there wasn’t as many as last year. The Red Wethersfield onion was also planted around them and got rolled on, but the chamomile survived the cats.

The mint did okay but actually had to fight off an invasive flower (possibly creeping bellflower, but we never let them grow big enough to confirm) that keeps trying to choke them out, even in the chimney blocks! Which is saying a lot, since mint us usually the invader. I was able to do limited weeding, but these are growing in from below and it’s pretty much impossible to get them out completely. Basically, I just had to weed them enough for the mint to be able to get bigger, then they could crowd out the weed.

The chives, on the other hand, were their usual enthusiastically growing selves.

Strawberries

I was surprised at how well the ones by the asparagus did. They’re a few years old and normally past their prime, but we did get a few ripe berries out of them.

Then the deer ate them.

Deer really seem to love strawberry leaves!

Even putting a makeshift fence around them was not enough to deter the deer.

*sigh*

The new Albion Everbearing strawberries did really well. They grew and spread runners, which I spread around and set the leaf clusters against the soil to root, so we could expand them to other areas in the future. I had thoughts to use them as a ground cover in our budding food forest, for example. They bloomed and developed berries, and we even had a few ripe ones to taste.

Then the deer got them.

I didn’t have a fence around the bed, but I did have poles with flashy pinwheels to startle them away, but it wasn’t enough. I put a net around the bed and they started to recover, only for a deer to actually tear through the netting and get at about half of them. I had a short length of chicken wire I could put around the side with the hole, but by that time, there just wasn’t much season left for them to recover in. There was new growth, though, so I’m hoping they survived.

*sigh*

The runaway success story, though, is the tiny variety of strawberries we grew from seed. Being in the old kitchen garden, the deer don’t get to them, I guess. Too close to the house? I don’t know. They got big and bushy, strong and healthy, and were very prolific! I was really impressed with how they did.

Conclusion and plans for next year

Herbs

I had visions of having fresh culinary herbs to use with our cooking as needed throughout the summer, and gathering blossoms and leaves for herbal teas.

The problem is, we keep forgetting we have herbs in the garden.

With the chamomile, I didn’t want to harvest any blossoms as there weren’t that many this year, and I wanted them to go to seed, instead.

I did remember to use the thyme a couple of times, but that was it. I didn’t even harvest any to dehydrate.

In past years, we gathered fresh mint leaves to make fresh mint tea, but just never got around to it this year. In past years, we used chive blossoms to make infused oils and vinegars, but that didn’t happen this year, and I ended up deadheading them so they wouldn’t spread seeds all over the grass outside the chimney blocks.

Basically, we had so many things happening this year, including lots of things breaking down, that we just didn’t have the spoons left to do this stuff this year. We also went from a very wet late spring to a very hot summer that made doing anything outdoors more difficult.

As for the strawberries, those wonderfully prolific little strawberries – I don’t know if they are a while strawberry, or an alpine variety – the seed kit didn’t name them – that did so well…

The berries themselves just aren’t that big a deal. We have native wild strawberries in the maple grove that manage to produce berries even while choked out by creeping bellflower, and those have an intense strawberry taste. They’re just really tiny. These ones are larger, but they don’t have that intense wild strawberry taste. If they’re not perfectly ripe, they’re actually rather bitter. For that brief time of perfect ripeness, they’re good, but not as good as, say, the Albion Everbearing strawberries.

So while they are a success, they are essentially taking up space that we can grow something more suitable for a kitchen garden.

Which means that, in the spring, I will try and find a good place to transplant them, where they can grow wild.

I might actually transplant the Albion Everbearing strawberries into the old kitchen garden, where they will have better protection from the deer! I really want to expand our strawberries, because we love them so much. The ones with the asparagus, I’m considering a lost cause at this point, but if we can keep the Albion everbearing ones going and spreading, that would be fantastic.

We currently have the larger rectangular bed in the old kitchen garden winter sown with the “greens” mix – spinach, chard, kohlrabi and tiny bok choi, and if the strawberries get transplanted, they will likely go into the long, narrow bed along the retaining wall. So that leaves most of the wattle weave bed (assuming the chamomile reseeds itself successfully again) and the tiny raised bed potentially for herbs.

I’ve picked up seeds for basil and fern leaf dill, though I have seeds for other dill and herbs as well. I don’t know that I will try growing thyme again this year, and oregano just doesn’t seem to want to germinate for us, so I think I will try different varieties this year. If the winter sown greens actually survive and grow, and we have things to harvest, I think we will be more likely to remember to harvest herbs, too.

We will definitely have to find ways to keep the cats off the garden beds, though. I’ll need to build a cover to fit over the larger rectangular bed. The wattle weave will probably get hoops and netting.

The problem with all these barriers to protect our garden from cats and wildlife is, it makes it hard to weed and water them, too!

Next year, however, the old kitchen garden will be a lot further along in being a kitchen garden, too, so that would be another step towards long term goals. It’s slow going, but we are managing to eek our way towards them!

The Re-Farmer