Darn Weeds

Weeds are persistent little buggers. I mulched my garden to within an inch of its life with several inches of old corn silage. We hadn’t used it in years and there were no weeds growing in it at all; not even corn. It should be free of weeds now; I should be sitting pretty with my huge garden and nary a weed – right? Wrong!

My gardens have always had a particular penchant for growing weeds in spite of many back-breaking hours pulling them up and spraying deterrents between the rows being careful not to hit the veggies I wanted. Of course you can’t get anywhere near tomatoes with weed killer, such as Round Up™ because it is related to a family of weeds it kills and they will be dead just being near it. I spent days working the soil, amending fertilizing nutrients into the soil, planting the garden (three times in some places that still didn’t come up- writer growls) and mulching the plants after they came up. I tilled fervently between the rows until the plants were big enough to mulch and hoed weeds between plants. I plotted where everything had been planted so I could identify the plants from the weeds. We got too much rain at first, hence the replanting, and not enough warmth, and then the rain pretty well dried up, but there is enough moisture to hold out for a few weeks before I have to irrigate. We had a couple of hot days where the plants really took off. And then it happened.

We began a building project that took most of the weekend every weekend when I had off work to do any real time consuming work. I couldn’t even get the lawn mowed until a couple of our nephews came to help on the project so that I had a few hours to at least mow the hay field, I mean the lawn. It rained every day, which made the grass and the weeds take off they were part of a race and within two weeks there were so many weeds I couldn’t find the garden. They came up primarily in the rows with the vegetables. They still did an excellent job of invading the mulch, but mostly they turned my vegetables into a jungle. I told my husband the lamb’s quarter (most prevalent) was edible; I should just harvest it and call it a day. He said he wasn’t a cow and would not eat it. Well, darn.

I spent hours pulling weeds and not making much progress. I filled bucket after bucket on the tractor and dumped them on what will be a burn pile from the tear out of the old building materials from the barn. I looked at the carnage that had once been my garden. They take as many good plants as they do other weeds because they have intertwined their roots with the good plants and their branches with the other plants’ branches. 

The weeds are still there, waving their leaves hello. If they could talk, they would be taunting me, “I thought you were getting rid of me! Hey, where’s the vegetables?”