the 2 hour strawberry bed remodel

The old strawberry beds were in pretty rough condition and we needed to expand them a bit to make room for more. There were three 4x4 squares made from various recycled materials several years ago. We had some trees on the bank that needed to come down to allow more sun through as well as for preventive maintenance. We had a beautiful afternoon and needed something to fill a couple hours after piddling about this morning a bit.
I dug the strawberries out of the old beds so that I could dismantle them while the manthing took the trees down, measured everything out and did the needed trimming to build the bed, I moved soil around and began gathering fallen leaves and cardboard boxes to use as filler material. The new bed is a fair bit longer than the old beds were in total but they are a little bit less wide. Extra soil is hard to come by around here so we tend to fill beds with what we have on hand and will compost down to make a decent growing bed. Today cardboard and leaves were the filler

After wrestling the logs over to where we needed them and after some fighting with them, we got them into place. Manthing worked on cleaning up the majority of the mess we made while I worked on filling the bed back up. Hopefully, with the trees we took down today and several others we have harvested the area will produce better than it has for the last couple years.
I don't quite have it all filled in but will finish it tomorrow and replant all the strawberries with some feed sack weed barriers and mulch. Because they are not very deep beds and because we are composting as it grows, the bed will be quick to dry out come summer.
We were able to salvage much of the material that the old beds were made of. While it aint pretty and cannot be used for many things, there are still things and stuff we can reuse the already recycled materials for.

The new bed is 18 foot long and a planting area 32 inches wide. The entire project to this point took right at two hours with the two of us working on it.