strawberry bed

The weather is finally getting warm enough that I can start the work on my yard.  While I was at the store, I found some strawberry roots for sale for a good price, so I bought some.  Now I just need a place to put them.  I already have one strawberry plant that I uprooted and brought with me when we moved to this house.  It has been living happily in a pot through the winter.  (it even gave us a few strawberries!)  But I want a happy strawberry patch.  I have this spot in my backyard: 

 I'm not sure what the previous owners were thinking when they created this spot.  It's next to my patio.  The black iron thing you see is a doorway trellis.  Like, the kind of thing you would see at the entrance to a garden party.  I don't know why they put it right there.  You can't even walk through it at that angle.  Anyway, so I decided that would be a good place for a raised strawberry bed. 

I'm not going to pretend this was easy.  We really had to put in some grunt work to get that trellis thingy out of the way.  And the overgrown bushes and gravel were no picnic either.  But after a couple hours of work, this is what we've got now:

It's flat. 

This is my plan:  Since strawberries can be a little persnickety, I'm going to make a raised bed so that I can control the soil better.  I am going to haunt craigslist for some more cinder blocks or some bricks that I can stack up in a square about three feet high.  Then I'm going to fill it with garden soil (I mean the bags of garden soil from the store), compost, and manure.  I'm also hoping that building it up a little higher will keep the rabbits out. 

Cross your fingers for some strawberry jam this fall!