Strawberry Countdown

So if  you didn't know, we're planting 1000 strawberry plants this year for everyone to enjoy eating and picking next summer! We've been sooooo busy with all of our other planting that we haven't really had time to get the rootstock in. Now that we have all the peppers planted (finally!), and have gotten back up to speed on a lot of odds and ends plantings we can get back to planting strawberries. After our first planting of 175 plants, which took about half a day to plant with three people, a shovel, and a watering can, we're trying to streamline our system a bit. We strapped a single sweep onto our cultivator drawbar and used the tractor to dig a trench down each of the rows in our strawberry patch. This makes it a lot faster since we'll be able to put two people on planting and one person on watering. Today I managed to get 100 plants in by myself in about an hour and a half. Soooooo.... 275 down.... 725 to go!