Weeds weeds everywhere

Already this year a lot of time is being taken up weeding. But, as you can see, there is a lot of square footage in this garden.

There are many different types of weeds encountered here. I am not good at identifying them but I would love to know if anyone else can. I have noticed from year to year that the types of weeds change. Once I eradicate a certain type, another type becomes more prolific. This year, we have the following:

This grass. I wish it would grow in the actual yard. When i yank it up, i throw it over into the yard, hoping it will take root there. All i really have in the "yard" is crabgrass, patches of dirt, and weeds. But unfortunately not this particular one. Which i don't want in the garden.

There's this one, which looks like an herb, doesn't it? I wonder if this is a remnant of something the gardener before me planted, before I came onto the scene. The garden layed fallow and became a jungle for a couple of years in between the last gardener and me. But there is something fragrant and tasty-smelling when I weed, and I have always suspected this is it.

It grows up to look like this:

I mean, it sort of looks like something you would munch on, doesn't it? (I know the bunny thinks so.) It is hard to pull up, has a deep root system with thick, ropy roots along with thready shoots, that, if you don't pull up when it's young, turn into woody substances.

Then there's this one:

It looks like lily pads, sort of, and is an invasive vine. It's very easy to pull up. It has little purple flowers but the root system is not deep and it's thready.

This one is easy to pull up but pops up all over the place. Before I was familiar with it, I thought it was one of the plants I had planted, like a pea or something (last year.) Now I'm wise to it. Not sure what it actually is, though.

Then there is this:

This is a seed pod dropped all over the garden (ALL OVER IT) by some tree in the vicinity. It looks sort of like a feather, doesn't it. A beautiful piece of nature's handiwork. On the left hand side you have a lighter than air, papery substance made for the express purpose of taking flight. On the right hand side you have a seed encased in a pod. It lands in my garden, plants itself, aaaaand:

The pod begins to disintegrate. The seed germinates. And a little tree begins to grow.

And then I yank that sucker out.

But there is no way I can ever pick up all the pods laying all over the garden. Lordy.

Anyway, if you know what any of these weeds are, lemme know!

The Newspaper is Indeed Biodegradable

This is a post about weeds, and weeding. There is (or WAS!) a very nefarious weed patch in the garden that I had neglected in favor of weeding near the veggie plants. Here is a quite embarassing photo of it. As i have stated before, after killing all of the old weeds with Round-up, the new weeds that have very prevalently emerged are nefarious grasslike weed.

These are SUCH a pain in the neck to dig up b/c you have to dig up each individual blade, and they all have a root! Today we tried to use a rake as a hoe and just turn up the dirt, then pull up the weeds easily. This did not work. However, Mister Siren was helpin in the garden today, so thankfully I left him to this section and I did other tasks.

There were many to attend to. For instance, the inspection and replacement of the newspaper mulch. When I originally layed it down, it immediately improved weed conditions in the garden. I did a 4-sheet thickness on the recommendation of most articles, but this has proved to be not enough, for the heavy rains of Virginia.


The garden, in general, is looking a little ragged. I have a huge tree located right above it that drops seed pods and leaves on it constantly. This makes it look messy. Then the rain beats down and throws up dirt and mud onto all of the plants, and turns the newspaper into mush, allowing the stronger weeds to break through the newspapers, as you see above. We spent a good 2.5 hours today cleaning and weeding, and laying down fresh newspaper where needed.

Behold the before and after photos:

BEFORE:
And, AFTER:


BEFORE:

And, AFTER:
Okay, so now if we could control the weeds around the perimeter, that would be great. For some reason, in places we have sprayed before, the plants seem to have developed some type of Round-up resistance. I think that is why, when we sprayed that grass-stuff, it did not die.

I love this garden!

Kate Moss is in the garden

I'm losing the fight against weeds. No, i'm not going to show you the weeds. It's embarassing. But i will tell you that I weed, and I weed, and I weed, and then I turn around and basically in the same afternoon the weeds have popped up again. I really need to mulch to prevent new weeds from popping up in the spaces I have already weeded over and over again. And weeding is not really that fun, folks!!

I am also poor. Grandma suggested, and several websites, newspaper as a mulching material. And I like this idea, because it is free. The garden is so big that to put down the 3-4 inches of tree bark mulch necessary to prevent weeds would cost a fortune. You can also use grass clippings, I hear, but our grass clippings are rife with weeds. You may recall, if you read this blog, how the weed-stop plastic works: take a look here. The other good thing about newspaper is that it is biodegradable. Hopefully not too soon.

The trick is to put down 3-4 sheets of thickness. I did that. You also want to get it close to the plants.
I had to use rocks to weigh it down, but you will want to give it an initial soaking to keep it stable so that it does not blow away. You are looking at the hybrid Big Boy or Better Boy tomato plant, here. It is the one I showed in a previous post that is showing a few flowers. :)

I do need to put down more papers and eventually get the entire garden mulched. As it is, I was really trying to concentrate on the rows between the lettuces. As you can see, here,
the newspaper mulch is serving a dual function: keeping weeds at bay, as well as defining the rows of greens/lettuces for us. Before, I got a little nervous and edgy everytime the Mister stepped foot in the garden and began walking in that general direction (the lettuce patch) because there were so many weeds and the little baby sprouts were almost indistinguishable. Now you can really tell where the rows are.

Here are some photos of how the greens are doing. Well, you can already tell how the mesclun greens are doing, the PRIDE OF THE GARDEN!!
I really washed them out with this photo. If you want to learn how to take great photos, go to this website and check out her photography section. (Pioneer Woman). Every photo she has on that site is fantastic and she gives great tips. If you want to read about gardening without knowing anything and a lot of trial and error, but a pervading sense of delight, keep coming back here.

So, in a closer look at the lettuce rows, here is the sorrel these days:
This is an extreme closeup. Now, remember that this row was really failing and I had to replant it completely after the extended rainy period, so this is newly sprouted. Notice the ground is wet. It has also been raining again for the last three days. Well at least I do not have to water!

Here is the arugula - a newly sprouted bunch and then an older, more mature bunch:
So now you know what arugula looks like when it grows out of the ground.

This is what the bibb lettuce is looking like these days:

Still little babies. You can see the newspaper edging right up to it. So, hopefully this newspaper experiment will really help me out, here. According to this article, it is very effective. And according to this guy, he uses the method all the time. My neighbor, a previous White House horticulturalist, gave the thumbs up to this method and gave me the advice to soak the paper first. So, we shall see! Stay tuned!

A sodden mess is what we have here

What happens when it rains for eight days straight? Well you cannot weed and the weeds proliferate. Here is a photographic example of the kinds of weeds that are growing in this garden. Patches of grass, basically. I think since I killed all the other kinds of weeds with the Roundup, the grasslike stuff is able to come up. Unfortunately it does not grow in the rest of the yard, where the crabgrass chokes it. The yard is revolting and not grassy at all.


There are other types of weeds growing, but unfortunately they are covered in mud. We got out there and valiantly, for the first time we were able to in over a week, attacked them in tandem for about two hours.

The sad part is that a lot of the plants I started from seed are not growing, they are being choked out by the constant rain and no sun. Plants need sun, this is a basic concept. In addition, their roots will rot if they are overwatered. In addition, if weeds proliferate (the weeds seem not to mind the constant rain and minimal sun) around them, the weed roots will choke out their roots.

Take the bibb lettuce, for example. This is what it looks like these days:



Pitiful. You can barely tell it's supposed to be something. It's supposed to rain all weekend, too, and I just hope it can hang on until next week. Take a look at our ONE lonely pea plant:


To you it looks like it's flourishing, to us, though, it's at the end of the muddiest part of the garden that does not drain well, surrounded by encroaching weeds. If you notice in these photos the mud is really churned up - that is a result of a couple of hours of hard labor digging up weeds. Weeding in mud is easy, by the way, although no weeding feels good on the back. Well, anyway, it is interesting to note that the one surviving pea plant IS at the muddiest end of the row. I wonder if they like really wet flooded soil . . .

There IS some good news in all of this: the bush beans!


Some of them that you can't see, are a little withered and sad, but most of them are towering and gracious. I hope they continue to do well. The zucchini look the same as last time i posted, and I thinned them out to two plants per area. I am supposed to thin them to one plant, but with more rain coming over the next few days, I will wait to see if any die off naturally. I am kind of scared.

The basil - no sign of it.

The container of dill has sprouted and I am overjoyed, finally! The container of Early Girl tomatoes had begun to develop white fungus, and i pulled it out of the rain on Thursday. The white fungus is receding and it got some sun today. That is my insurance policy for tomatoes so I am trying to tend to it better. Too bad it took me so long to remember I could pull it out of the rain! Duh!

Send me photos of YOUR gardens and plants so I can post them!!

Garden 2009

Okay, what we've all been waiting for, me included.

Garden, 2009 summer edition.

Well last year i did not have the heart to post pictures of the flood plane it became after my bright idea to dig the ground up and take most of the earth out and create a big hole in the yard and call it a garden. Funny how that can cause a place to collect water and not drain well. And then, guess what. Well, a weed jungle took over and with my limited time I was not able to vanquish the weeds in the 15 x 14 area. It seemed like every day when I would weed for an hour, I would go back out and the area I had not weeded would have grown over.

Then it rained for two weeks straight, and I could not weed, and the rain beat my plants to death, and the weeds took over, and I was done.

But, look on the bright side. It's a new dawn, a new day. I have new ideas this year. I have a new plan. Live and learn. Take a lick and keep on ticking. So this is how we started.

#1: fill the low spots back in with dirt. We did that.
#2: While waiting for planting, keep weeds from growing. Plan for this was to put weed-stop plastic over the garden, as a preventive measure. Gardening books, sites, and the manufacturer of the plastic assured me that if we put this plastic down, and used stakes to secure it, it would a) prevent any weeds from growing b/c they couldn't grow high enough, and b) create so much heat they would die.

Well, behold the results of the use of "Weed-Stop" plastic:


As you can see, the weeds have grown so profusely under this covering that they are actually spilling out between the overlapped sections. Furthermore, they are lifting up the plastic itself. Finally, you can't see this, but they are pulling up the stakes used to secure the plastic.

I pulled the plastic up when it got around time to plant, to find this disappointment:

Basically a garden of weeds! yay! So, first things, first, a plan for these weeds. My dad's suggestion was to get out the hoe and start weeding. I, however, knew that there was no time in my schedule for a weeding assignment of these proportions. I went to the Lowe's and looked into their weed solutions. They have two: one is called Preen, and is granules you can put into your veggie garden once your plants are already established and growing. That's because it prevents weeds (and other plants) from growing.

The other solution is RoundUp. You can spray it on live plants and it kills them - to the root system - in a week. It says it is safe to use in vegetable gardens b/c it only kills the plant you spray it on. What about poisoning soil you have not planted yet, though? I asked the garden center guys, and they said wait a good three weeks before planting. So, here's what the weeds looked like three weeks after I sprayed them with RoundUp:


Take a goooooood look at that. Now isn't that pretty? Heck yeah, RoundUp. Forget you, Weed-Stop plastic. RoundUp has a pleasant coconut smell that reminds me of sunscreen at the beach.

So, today was planting day! I did not start seeds indoors this year. No way. I waited and bought plants at the store for transplanting, and did seeds straight into the ground for the rest.

We carefully planned out how we would plant the garden in rows, etc. by using vines to represent rows, and putting the seed packets at the end, as you can see:



Here are some of the transplanted plants:


That's a row of tomatoes, and off to the right are two bell peppers (red and orange). The tomatoes are a big heirloom yellow one called Mr. Stripey, a Big Bush hybrid, and a cherry tomato. The farthest plant is a jalapeno pepper plant. Mr. Stripey is below, pre-transplant:

I kept a few plants in containers. One of them is a tomato plant, b/c I cannot live without tomatoes and I want to be on the safe side. This tomato plant is called "Early Girl" and it bears fruit much earlier than the others, a month earlier. In the other two pots are dill, and cilantro, the two herbs which infect everything around them - so I figured they would be good candidates for containers. The cilantro was a transplant but the dill is seeds.



I planted other herbs in the garden, though. There are three herb plants at the end of the lettuce rows: a tarragon plant, a rosemary plant, and a lavendar plant:


They mark rows of leaf lettuce (bibb lettuce), mesclun greens, and arugula, and then there is an unmarked row of sorrel (a spicy lemony green).

Here is the entire garden in its present glory:


In addition to the lettuces, tomatoes, and peppers, there are the herbs mentioned, as well as a row of zucchini, bush beans, sugar snap peas, and two rows of basil.

Can't wait!!!