I'm fighting weeds nearly everywhere, from the lawn to the new perennial bed to the "squash garden area" to the bark paths I set up in December.
The thing is, I had read all about lasagna gardening and weed suppression by using cardboard, piled with straw or leaves, piled with compost, and voila, the weeds would be gone. Wild violets didn't read the same articles, unfortunately, and they punched right through the cardboard, wet or dry. So I've been yanking, hoeing, cursing...and barely staying ahead of them. They even came up through cardboard and six inches of soil in a raised bed. Didn't slow them down at all. As Sister #1 says, "I'm not a bit surprised. They look delicate, but they're monsters."
We had a pretty bad storm a week ago, and many people lost trees. I caught a tree service as they worked on a house around the corner. They delivered wood chips to me for free. A mountain of wood chips!
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| Mt. Woodchips |
48 hours later, it was about halved in size. I had spread out more cardboard and lots and lots of chips, over both the area in the right-hand distance in this following shot, which is where I'll be putting in currant bushes and some rhubarb next year, and in my "squash bed" of the foreground which is a large open area where I've augmented the soil by piling on the cardboard, leaves, and compost--and now more cardboard and chips over that. I'll build hills of compost for the squash and melon in the front two dirt rows you can barely see in here. It'll be good for them to be able to sit on wood chips rather than bare dirt anyway, so this should work fine.
The four conduits in this shot are going to carry a nylon net trellis, and I plan to grow cherry tomatoes there. It's shaded until about 2 p.m., but I think they'll do okay. That's still 5-6 hours of light, plenty of heat, and cherry tomatoes are more forgiving of low light situations. The white hoops to the right of the shot are in the 4 x 4 bed that was my only garden last year. You can see in there the peas, regular and snow, which are doing fine. I went with rustic branch teepees for the snow peas, and bamboo for the regular peas.
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| Wood chips doing their job |
So that's what I've been doing this week--lots and lots of digging and hoeing and pulling weeds, and the bark project, Phase II. I get to plant tomatoes next week, and yay for that! I think I can squeeze in 28 tomato plants in the ground, with another 3 in hanging baskets. I've been hitting garage sales looking for canning jars, for I'll be canning tomatoes from August to October, I'm sure, and freezing beans and peppers. I also have a dehydrator, and I'm looking forward to putting together "soup mixes" of vegetables, where I only have to dump a jar of dehydrated home-grown bits into my crockpot to have a healthy winter soup four hours later.
Weeds are always a gardener's enemy, as are pests (I've already seen Mexican bean beetles, which are about 2 months early for beans.) I knew that. Now I'm living with it. I have good plans, but as my military friends always say, plans never survive the first engagement with the enemy.
