Great garden weather and all. But it also means great weed weather.

When the phone repairman was here, he briefly considered digging a trench to put in a whole new underground line all the way to the house and looked down a long bed between the back fence and a row of espalier where the line would have to go.

“Is that . . . something . . . or is it just . . . ” he wondered.

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Something, I assured him, nothing I want dug up, in spite of appearances. Subsumed by this jungle are two blueberry bushes, a seaberry bush, and three juneberry bushes.

Time to weed and mulch. It just ALL GROWS SO FAST.

Poke weed.

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Garlic Mustard. Hate this one especially. I keep a separate bag in which to dispose this because the chickens won’t eat it and the seeds will continue to be spread if I don’t keep it out of the mulch.

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Smartweed. If you see this and think the little pink seedheads are pretty, don’t be fooled. Never let it go to seed. It will take over your whole universe.

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Trumpet vines and sawbriers with their unstoppable subterranean root systems. Need a shovel for these two ruffians.

IMG_7631IMG_7630Ragweed. Ugh.

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I work in the garden everyday, but it tends to be unfocused job-hopping. I see a weed, I might pull it, I might give it an evil look and a promise to BE BAAACK, but every year around this time, my best intentions have failed.

It’s gone way beyond mere pulling here and there and evolved into Tom Sawyerian fantasies of tricking gangs of naive neighborhood children into believing how fun it is to weed and mulch. (My own children already know better).

I have a new plan, and it’s a whole two days old and I haven’t fallen off the wagon yet.

Don’t laugh.

I plan to weed an entire row of the garden every morning before it gets too blazin hot and then call it a day until the next morning.

Until it’s all done.

And I have to start over at the beginning.

I will.

I think I can, I think I can.

Yesterday I weeded the center path. Here’s the after. I wasn’t thinking about blogging and didn’t take a before picture first, but it was impassable and the bricks had stuff growing between most of them.

IMG_0470It may not look like much, but I was so proud of it I kept thinking up excuses to walk by and stare.

This morning I tackled this row, bordered by garlic just getting ready to dig, renegade-but-delicious strawberry plants, and a horde of volunteer tulsi.

Before:

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After:

IMG_0474The after may not look great, but I feel so much better knowing all that smartweed and garlic mustard is routed and I can see down the path again. It’ll look better with a layer of mulch and after I transplant those wayward strawberries in the fall.

Tomorrow is another day . . .  to weed.