Last year lane says she bought three, ever-bearing strawberry plants.

She didn’t have space in the garden for them so she planted them in a plastic window box and sat them on the garden wall.

If you are familiar with growing strawberries then you already know what happened next but since some of you aren’t experienced with the growth pattern of strawberries she is about to tell you.

The strawberries did great in the window box for a while. She picked quite a few berries off of these three plants and all was fine until the plants started making baby plants or runners as they are called. Then the runners went everywhere; down the sides of the window box. They even spread out in the window box crowding out the parent plants. Still with no room to put these pesky things she pinched them off and made them into compost.

So this year when they started growing I suggested to lane that she make herself a large bed for them out of cinder block since we have many. So lane decided to take my suggestion and make a raised bed for the strawberries. First lane looked for an all day sun spot and that wasn’t in the way of anything else. After some searching lane decided to use one of her flower beds that was close to the garden. Perfect, she said to herself, Now how to go about building this thing. She was somewhat nervous about building it at first all by “myself”. Since she had never done anything like that before. She had always been the “holdthat”.

But, she says, she had watched me build many things out of block so she pretty much knew what to do and felt confident that she could do it.

She got started digging the footer for the base knowing to always get the first course level and straight. If you do you won’t have problems.

When she did run into something she wasn’t quite sure about she came to me and asked for the benefit of experience.

The project took, probably three or four hours but lane did it and it turned out well. She is very proud of herself because it’s the first thing she has ever built on her own. Its not perfect but almost she says. She really likes it and the strawberry plants do to. Just goes to show that you never know what you can do until you try.