Let the Weeding Begin

This muggy overcast weather we have been experiencing doesn't do much for us personally, but the weeds love it. The hardest part of gardening no doubt is dealing with weeds. A small garden is somewhat "easy" to manage, but when you have two that cover over 1500 square feet each, it's a little daunting. As we are organic, we have very little choices other than actually weeding by hand. One is mulching. We have done that to the far end of the garden at Intervale Road where the potatoes are growing. It is helping, but some things like milk weed and blackberry bushes just want to come through. Here is a picture of what the far corner looked like Saturday morning.

Unfortunately, all that lush green vegetation to the front and left is not for eating, but is weeds.

The close up here shows that we do have nice brown mulch, yet we still have grass and black berry bushes coming right up through.
After a couple hours of weeding, we finally had only potato plants in that area.

The other parts of the garden that aren't mulched we can use the tiller in.
This allows us to "weed" between the rows and then get the stuff right in the rows by hand..... for now. It isn't easy work either, and each time you till, you stir up new weed seeds. It's kind of a rut you get stuck in, and we hope to break out of it soon. We are going to try a new technique of burning the weeds when they first come up again, to see if that works. Gardening is all about trial and error, and finding what works one year doesn't necessarily mean it will work the next.

After the weeding was done, we seeded some more crops of carrots and beets, as well as planted more of our 4 varieties of eggplants (some have already been set out in our other garden).


Between the two gardens, and the succession plantings, we hope to have a steady stream of vegetables. Usually when you garden for home use, you get what you get when it comes, and that's it. But with succession planting, you have a crop of beans for two weeks, and when they fizzle out, you have another crop just beginning. This is our first year really working with this method, and it will be interesting to see how it works out.