Starting the Garden

…finally. I know, Memorial Day weekend is a great time to start summer and open the pool. But it’s a little late to just be starting the garden.

And when I say “start,” I mean start weeding. As in, prepping. As in, haven’t looked at the vegetable garden since last summer when I pulled everything out (Logan did dump a bunch of mulched leaves on top of the whole thing in the middle of the fall).

So here’s what was waiting for me…

4 beds filled with weeds

Walkways filled with spreading weeds

And my personal favorite:
I’m not sure if you can tell, but those are tomato cages. Completely lashed to the ground by overgrown weeds.

I’m so embaressed.

The reason for my garden absence? Yep, sweet baby girl.

Remember this post about removing weeds: To Weed or Not To Weed? Unfortunately these weren’t any help. The weeds were just too thick. The only solution was real weeding. Yuck.

So, armed with a shovel and a hose. I set to work. For 3 hours. On the hottest weekend of the year so far.

I wet down soil since we haven’t had rain in awhile. Then I used the shovel to loosen the roots. And pulled. And pulled. To finish prepping the beds, I turned over the soil and let the water run through the bed for a few minutes. I’ll add some compost and a few bags of soil when I’m ready to plant.

After tons of sunscreen, sweat, and mud, the beds look like this:
The walkways are still a complete mess. That wouldn’t usually be a problem, but we have so many creeping weeds (something like wild strawberries) that if these weeds don’t get pulled, they’ll just take over the beds again. The current plan is to have Logan weed eat them close to the ground. Then I’m considering using boiling water to kill the weeds and covering the ground with paper.

Hopefully next weekend, I’ll get my seedlings in. And hopefully I won’t have another weed takeover. Hopefully.