What I did in-between meetings today.

Two years ago, I was let go from the company I worked at. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, although at the time, I didn't know it yet. After my bout of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to start my own graphic and web design business, and I have not looked back. Losing my job was the kick in the butt to become a new business owner. So in a way, I guess I have to thank my old boss for being such a jerk. Haha. I love working for myself, but I've learned that one must be very disciplined. Especially when you work from home. This morning I had 2 early morning conference calls, and in between calls, I needed a mental break. So I decided to clean out the strawberry bed. It was a mess from all the leaves that had fallen into the garden. Unfortunately for us, our garden is surrounded by deciduous trees. Therefore every autumn, leaves fall right into the fenced in garden area. This is what the strawberry bed looked like before I cleaned it.

And this.  Leaves everywhere!  I hate it when the garden looks like this, but we kept the leaves in the bed to protect and insulate the strawberry plants from the winter.  And what a winter we had!  It's been raining a lot lately, so I couldn't clean the bed out until today.  It was warm and sunny and I took the opportunity to run outside and clean up the leaves before I had to jump on another client phone call.

That's what I love about working from home. I can try to squeeze in garden chores between work. :)  Here's the garden bed with most of the leaves removed.  The cleaning took about an hour.  I am so happy with the way the strawberry plants look.   It was hard to tell how they were doing under all those leaves.  Looks like they liked being under there, the leaves did their job of keeping the plants protected under all that snow we got. They are healthy and have quadrupled in size and quantity.  The plants are a year old and used to look like this.  These plants have been sending out runners like crazy and growing really well.  I can't wait until they start producing strawberries, this will be the first year that we get any.  I can almost taste them now!