When we moved in here last October, I brought along some strawberry plants. With no idea where I'd later want them, I just stuck them in the ground near the trailer.

Fast forward ahead to the present day, in which deer are dining like crazy on anything outside our garden fence. So rather than just transplanting runners into a new spot the way I usually would have done, I dug up every single strawberry plant.

Summer-transplanted strawberries wilt like crazy the first couple of days after they've been moved. But a little water morning and evening quickly pushed ours over that hump. Some of the older leaves won't make it (and a couple of the plants similarly bit the dust). But the rest are now resilient to normal summer temperatures and should fruit for me next year.

Meanwhile, I expanded the planting with twenty almost-dormant Mara Des Bois from an online nursery. Most of my favorite sources had already stopped shipping bare-root strawberries for the season, so it's possible these little guys won't fruit next spring. However, they're everbearers, so if nothing else we should taste this much-lauded variety a year from now.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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