I have a horrible time with creeping charlie myself. It drives me crazy, and I really hate the smell of it. The best I can tell you is that creeping charlie is easy to pull up. Get a pair of garden gloves on, and start pulling. Then I would put some kind of physical barrier around your strawberries. Last year I put a raised garden bed literally in the middle of a patch of creeping charlie. I pulled up all the creeping charlie first, and then turned over the soil to make sure I killed all the roots. Then hubby helped me build a raised garden bed, which we filled with a foot and a half of soil or so. The creeping charlie still surrounds the raised bed (then I pull it all out), but it has never gotten in the bed.

You're going to have to edge that flower bed and keep pulling those weeds when you see them. I use old logs at the edge of mine and the grass hasn't invaded yet. Large rocks look good too. I dug a 6 inch wide trench at the edge and I keep that weeded once a week. It's very easy once you get a jump start on it.

I'm a pretty experienced gardener, and I still haven't found a good solution to your problem, if what you have is bermuda grass. It will grow under most border edgings, or sneak thru where the edgings overlap or crack, or creep over the top when you're not looking. I really think bermuda ought to be an honorary bamboo! When forced to put a bed in where bermuda exists, what I usually do is plant an 18 inch swatch of annuals along the edge of the bed. Then when I take them out in the fall, I meticulously dig out every bit of bermuda that escaped my control efforts, so next summer I start with a clean bed again. It's a pain, but it's the only thing I've found that works, at least for a while. Eventually a piece gets overlooked, and the bermuda gets a foothold, and the whole bed needs to be dug up, the bermuda blasted into oblivion by roundup, and it's time to start the whole struggle over again. I'd love to plant a bed in my front yard between my neighbor and myself, but I haven't bothered because the thought of coping with the bermuda stops me, I have too much yardwork already to start another epic bermuda battle at my age. Sue

"I am curious why you don't put much weight in the accuracy of the soil test because you haven't heard of this lab?" Answer: Most labs suck. :-) Back when we were testing labs against a relatively known sample, they were coming back with wildly different answers. Only two were very close--UMass and Logan. Logan won hands down in the end, and even they've had occasional problems. They're also the largest, best-monitored, and most economical at $20 a test. "Why would the lab be "estimating" the CEC number and overestimating based on calcium levels? Isn't this an analysis not an estimate (I don't understand how they perform the testing)." Any lab calculated CEC/EC from the saturations in the soil (except when doing an acetate analysis, and even then, it can get borked). With a higher-calcium soil, and yours is borderline, the EC is calculated too high. I've seen ECs calculated in the fifties that I knew durned well were around 10. Just like any other analysis that could be wrong, I can happily report "7.03139056." The number sound wonderful and incredibly accurate. If the significant digits are only 1, then anything past 7.0 is pointless. And if the test was bad, then the answer might actually be 6.8 or 7.4. I am curious what you skipped mentioning due to accuracy concerns." I'll usually specifically discuss saturation percentages and micronutrients. I didn't in your case as I'm not sure of the accuracy. There's no way I'd fiddle with, for instance, boron based on an unknown test. It's just too touchy and the consequences of making a mistake are too severe. "Potassium you mention not really needing until next year. What is the purpose of this in your eyes? I read it can help with cold hardiness, disease and stress tolerance, but what do you intend applying it to help with?" It's not seriously out of whack, but you paid for the test, so you might as well balance what isn't correct in the soil, eh? This would pull your potassium balance up to optimal. It's not so much "what I intend it to help with," but overall plant health over the long term. Over time, plants will use it, and the percentages will drop. Potassium is antagonistic with calcium and magnesium, both of which are high in your soil, so right now the plants are fighting for it rather too much and rather more than they should be. Adding more (going a bit high to counterbalance) restores a more-proper balance for your particular soil. "I am surprised to read you don't care about Nitrogen" On your soil test. :-) It'll vary by time of day, moisture in the soil, whether you applied fertilizer in the last few days or weeks, and the time of year. It's rare that any test of mine would come back with more than a few PPM because I feed organically, but any test will always come back with that during the growing season because I feed organically (except during dry spells). Feeding the lawn properly is critical and the feeding around here is tuned like a symphony. Testing nitrogen in the soil is something that doesn't concern me or anybody else who reads these things. Or, if they are concerned...well, I might question them as to why. "In regards to pH there is elemental sulfur and aluminum sulfate. Slow acting and fast acting from what I read. But your statement is there is nothing you can do about it. It is just too difficult and costly and too lengthy of a process or just that there is no noticeable benefit to trying to change it anyway?" More the latter. Aluminum...really should never be used. Al is toxic to plants and people pour it on their hydrangea (shaking head). If one must, use ferrous sulfate. I never met a soil that didn't have enough aluminum already for hydrangea color, all they need is the pH shift, and in a small area, iron will do. Elemental sulfur will get you into arguments because people actually seem to believe in the stuff for some reason. Dug in, it'll sometimes work really slowly for some period of time before it's gone and your natural pH starts to reassert itself because, in your case, you seem to have excess calcium in your soil hanging around. There are soils that are practically limestone and would literally require tons of sulfur, at which point they'd simply wash away as gypsum. In high-pH soils, it's slow to work, not terribly effective, and the bacteria that work on it are not active. In low pH soils, you don't need the stuff Surface applied, you lose 80%-95% to the air as smog. Don't do that. And I never recommend tilling in lawns because you'll end up with a permanently bumpy surface that you'll never get flattened again without professional help. Plus, most lawns simply don't mind any pH from 6.2 to 8.0 anyway. Arguments that they somehow object to anything over 6.8 are pure malarky. Go look at photos of nice lawns in Dallas, Texas--all grown on limestone bases. I never object to some extra calcium. It's not a problem, you simply have to adjust the potassium to account for it a bit.