May is usually the beginning of the strawberry harvest, so it’s also a perfect time to clean up the weeds. I’ve cleaned up all of the beds a few weeks ago, but with the rain and high-temperature mix, the weeds are growing like mad, and it was now time to clean them again.

Right now I have two strawberry beds on the opposite sides of the garden. The old bed is at the bottom of the garden, and the freshly planted one is at the top. Both were in desperate need of cleaning.

The old bed has two strawberry varieties, something big and something tiny. Names of the varieties are completely unknown, and even if they were known they would probably be wrong names. The bigger strawberries were planted by my mum dozens of years back. At that time nobody in Croatia really paid any attention to varieties. All you did was order if you wanted June bearing or everbearing strawberries. Even then you rarely got what you wanted. These were supposed to be everbearing ones, but it turned out they were June bearing. They are still growing years after, well their offsprings are, and they are delicious, but they were never overbearing. 

The second variety is an Alpine strawberry variety which was supposed to be everbearing. A few years back I bought a package of seeds of everbearing strawberries at our garden center. I’ve sown them, reported, and eventually transplanted them to the garden, but to my surprise, next year I realized that it was not an everbearing variety. It was actually an Alpine strawberry, which normally grows in my orchard wild, and I don’t need to sow the seeds to eat them. All I have to do is go to the orchard and pick them up. 

This is why I’ve been a bit skeptical when it comes to buying new varieties. But this year I finally decided to do it and bought 3 new varieties. Now, 2 months later, they are growing well, flowering, and will be full of strawberries. Our of 30 seedlings I lost only 2, and think that’s a great result, considering that I’ve planted them before the last frost, and they have been exposed to a couple of frost days. They shouldn’t mind the frost, I was careful to choose the varieties that are frost tolerant, but that applies to the already well-rooted plants, not the freshly planted strawberries. Still, they are now growing well and we’ll see how well they will taste. 

At the same time with strawberries, I’ve ordered and planted new rose bushes, and now I can say that I think they have all rooted. I wasn’t sure they would root down since they came without the soil, just the roots packed in sand, but they all started growing fresh leaves and branches, all have dark green leaves and none show any signs of drying.

The only rose that I’m still not too sure about is the yellow one in the shaded part of the garden. It is growing new branches, but it has just started growing them, so I don’t know if it will dry up later or not. This rose is in the coldest part of the garden, so it is no surprise that the plant took more time to start growing new leaves. 

Still, I honestly hope it has rooted and that next year I will have my first small roses. The garden will look so much better with a touch of the early flowering plants.