Weeding

The weather has been perfect for gardening this week. We’ve been working outside from “can ‘til can’t,” as the saying goes. June is the month for weeding. Half the garden has landscape cloth between the rows. That part went fast. Terry and I started at the other end with the cucumbers. I then went on to do the corn, thinning the seedlings as I went along. Who will live and who will die? At first, I thinned to about 8”. Then I remembered what a pain it is to dig the stalks out at the end of the season and thinned to 12”. I also reasoned that we would still have three dozen stalks per row. With each stalk producing one or two ears and 8 rows of corn, we won’t be short.

Corn, thinned and weeded

When the corn was done, I started the pumpkins. Hilda helped me after she finished weeding the potatoes. I tried a number of different strategies, depending on the weed. Amaranth is my favorite weed. If I grab it close to the ground and pull gently, out it comes. Left on the ground it will shrivel up to nothing, although as long as I have it in my hand, I might as well through it in the bucket. 

Green amaranth pulled from the ground with root intact (left) and still in the ground (right)

I hate the spotted spurge. It grows flat on the ground, for one thing, leaving a person no handle. It breaks easily, and I suspect that any bit that is left behind will sprout. Like purslane, it is the sea star of the garden. We were lucky not to have much purslane in the pumpkin patch. 

Spotted spurge

Dandelions aren’t worth worrying over. The seedlings will die if disturbed. The plants that are growing from taproots deep in the ground can’t be eliminated anyway. As I have said before, if you deprive a plant of its photosynthetic surface, it will eventually die. Grasses. Grrrrr. If the density isn’t too high, and the soil isn’t too compacted, it is possible to hoe them with some success. It is not possible to hoe sod. In the denser areas, I found it was most effective to use my Weed Bandit (a thin metal hoop with a handle). Grass also needs to be picked up to keep it from rooting again.

I like to sit on my little rolling stool while I weed, dragging my weed bucket along as I go. On one occasion this afternoon, I repositioned my stool and my bucket and sat down to start working again. I knew I was in trouble when I didn’t land when I should have. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in my bucket. It was difficult to recover from this position as my feet didn’t quite reach the ground, and I was tipped backward. I was glad Hilda was out working with me so I didn’t have to sit there until Terry wondered why I wasn’t cooking supper. As it was, the hardest part was to stop laughing long enough to do anything helpful.

Stuck in the bucket

It took us two days to get the pumpkins weeded. The whole garden looks great now! We won’t be doing much more weeding. The plants will soon be big enough to shade out the weeds, and very soon we will be too busy with the harvest to worry about weeding.

Pumpkin patch before weeding

Pumpkin patch after weeding

In other news, I helped Terry put up a deer fence around Nursery 5 back by the creek. Deer fence is 7’ high. He puts it on bamboo poles that are seated in PVC pipes in the ground. My job was to hold the roll of fencing upright and hand Terry wires while he secured it to the posts. This is his second deer fences. He did the pilot study around the apple trees by the house and was so pleased with the results that he is expanding his fenced-in areas.

The whole deer fence

Close up of deer fence

My prairie restoration area has spent a good deal of time in standing water lately. Many of the yellow coneflowers have died, but here’s one that didn’t. I didn’t see anything else new blooming this week.

Yellow coneflower