WEEDS!!

Last week, I spent days digging weeds out from around the my trees. I then hauled mulch to each tree and carefully created the “donut hole” to keep the cedar mulch from touching the trunk.

That was last week. Today is Monday and as I walked around my trees, what do I find? Weeds. Growing through the fresh mulch.

So here I am again, pulling weeds that by rights shouldn’t be there. Is gardening frustrating? No doubt. But so is everything else, or so it seems.

Take this blog, for example. When I try and key words into the paragraph blocks, the screen flips back to the top of the page, so I can’t see what I’m keying. It’s never done that before, What gives, Word Press? Is it me? Is it you?

And I keep getting the “WordPress.com is not responding” message, so have to recover the page. Meaning I have to keep saving or simply plan on losing it all. When I start a new paragraph block, it takes a while for the “type words here” message to show up. Like 30 seconds or even more.

I have a lot more to say about weeds, but not here and now. Oh well, maybe I’ll figure this out.

I keep thinking about the old IT staff joke about PICNIC. Problem in Chair, not in Computer. It’s probably me. Help!

Guess I’ll save my discussion of weeds for another time. Anybody else having a Word Press problem?

Want Fewer Weeds?

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Last autumn, after a full year of knee problems due to a fall, we had nine veg-beds chockfull of weeds.

Now before I come across sounding feeble, I didn’t fall due to lack of balance. Oh no. My black lab, Juno, managed to wrap her leash around my legs while I was trying to get the cat, Fat Boy, into his carrier. We were going to the vet. Juno went one way, the cat the other, and I crashed onto my left knee.

That was in July and for the next month, I was on crutches. No gardening possible.

By October, the raised beds were nothing but weeds. Wild brassicas, bind weed, horse nettle, spurge, some species of nastiness spread by rhizomes–ugh.

To alleviate the problem, we tilled the beds, cleared the detritus, and covered everything with black plastic bags to starve unwanted seeds.

Now it’s spring, the knee is healed, and we’re ready to garden. But since I don’t want to spend the summer on my still-somewhat-tender knees weeding, I decided to try the environmentally-friendly plastic mulch from Gardener’s Supply.

Before the weather turned nice enough to start, the Kansas State University Research and Extension horticultural newsletter let me know to set soaker hose under the plastic mulch to ease watering.

So that’s what we did. Marking the beds first and fastening our above-ground soaker hoses with earth staples, we organized a single raised bed.

And, those perforated circles were a snap to punch out using only fingers. No sharps required.

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We’ve planted bunching onions (I call them scallions) in this bed. We’ll see how it goes.

I have red plastic mulch for tomatoes, but more on that in two-three weeks.

Happy gardening.