També pots llegir això en català.

I like when my plants take it upon themselves to move beyond their space and find another. Yesterday I showed you the pumpkin vines that are winding their way around my rooftop garden. Today, we'll talk about a plant that sends its babies out into the void, to see if they can find a more suitable crib, and how you can help them along.

I'm talking about strawberries, of course. Every so often, a strawberry plant will send out a runner and along the runner, little nodes will form, with a few leaves and also the buds of new roots. If these new plants find dirt, they will create a whole new plant in the new space. Since strawberry plants only live four to five years, and really only produce for three of these, helping the runners find new ground is an ideal way to keep your strawberry production going, without having to buy any new plants.

Over the weekend, I moved my two large strawberry pots next to a large planter. I cleaned out the dying tomato plants and added some worm castings for fertilizer. Next, I draped the runners over the dirt, pressing the baby root systems into the dirt. The final step was to add the green mesh on top, cutting out holes for the new strawberry plants. This keeps my cat from digging in the dirt and it also helps the new plants and their roots stay down in the dirt. Once the new plants are established, the runners themselves will dry up and break down, leaving independent plants.

There are a few nodes that can't quite reach the dirt, and I'm hoping that they'll keep growing until they make it. If they don't, once the other new plants are established, I'll cut them off and plant them directly. After a few months in their new spaces, you can transplant them to other containers if you wish.

If your strawberries don't generate runners, it might be because it's not the right time of year or they don't have the proper conditions (enough water, nutrients, etc.). And if you get too many runners, your plant may stop producing strawberries. There's a lesson in there: you can't do everything at once and neither can your strawberry plants. Strawberries have very shallow roots systems and do well with frequent, moderate watering.

I'll be sharing some of these new strawberry plants with subscribers to this Aixeta page.

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In other news, my little sweet pumpkin baby is getting downright roly-poly. Check out the photo from Day 5! That said, I'm worried about the yellowing leaves, and hope that the plant can hold out long enough until the pumpkin gets ripe. So today I cooked up a concoction of insecticidal soap steeped with garlic and sprayed the tops and bottoms of all the leaves and the pumpkin itself. I hope it helps. (How do you make insecticidal soap? It's really easy. Dissolve a spoonful of potassium soap in a large cup of hot water. I added some mashed up garlic for good measure. Once it's dissolved, filter it and add that to a liter of cool water. That's it.)

I also found a bunch of brown marmorated stink bugs, on the pumpkin leaves, an on my grapes and raspberries. They are an invasive from Asia, first seen in Catalonia, in Girona, in 2016. That's only three years ago. Browsing on the Catalan government's Agriculture Department's Twitter, I noticed they had posted a notice about them just a few days ago, so I'm clearly not the only one who has them. They recommend vacuuming them (!), for now I've just been mashing them with my fingers, as gross as that sounds.

The other pest I had in the garden today was a magpie, eating some of my grapes that were hanging over the wall into my neighbor's terrace. I guess it was time to harvest them. I left the magpie a few. They made a perfect dessert after lunch. I'll tell you all about propagating grapes later on in the season. Last year, I took what I pruned and turned them into new grape plants, that are doing really well (despite sharing the planter with the ravenous pumpkin plant). Hopefully I'll be able to create enough grape plants to give away some to my subscribers this year. Yes! Do subscribe :)