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?”
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