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I refuse to use glyphosate (Roundup) to kill my weeds for many reasons. (That’s a topic for another blog.) So, I do all my weed-pulling the old-fashioned way… by hand. It’s an over-whelming task for a Florida gardener in the summertime. Ideally, I would go outside and pull weeds everyday to stay on top of the situation, but that just ain’t gonna happen. The weeds in the above picture took over my garden bed when I blinked. The seeds on the tops of those weeds will make the problem even worse because they will re-seed all over the place. It’s not the end of my gardening world though and it doesn’t take me long to pull the weeds out. They’re going to grow where I don’t want them no matter what I do. The bright side is that they won’t germinate as much in the winter, so I do get a much-needed break.
Loring picks the weed "flowers" and makes a bouquet with them.
I just recently put the clear plastic down to help suppress the weeds. As you can tell by the picture, the weeds laughed at me. They will grow through a pin prick in the plastic. The picture is embarrassing to me because it looks so untidy, but it is reality. I needed a break from the gardening beds during the hot, rainy months so I used the plastic. Many gardeners are against using plastic in the garden because it isn’t sustainable. I’ve learned that I have to do what works for us. I can clean up the garden bed in the above picture in a jiffy. It looks worse than it is. You should have seen my kitchen 30 minutes ago.
My chickens love the weeded garden.
My chickens love to hover underneath me when I’m weeding the garden. It all looks so tidy for about 5 minutes when I finish, then the girls spread the fresh dirt everywhere. It’s okay with me… they’re getting the bugs.
Yikes.
I don’t try to weed the entire garden in one day. It hurts my hands pretty bad to do that. Most people use machines to make their lives easier when it comes to these tasks, but I am stubbornly old-fashioned with my garden. It usually takes me about a week to get the weeds under control again. I don’t do too much at one time.
We’re getting our garden ready for our fall season vegetable garden. Grayson’s really excited to grow purple carrots and purple tomatoes. The purple tomatoes are from seeds that have been passed down from the Cherokee indians. We’re making a teepee out of pole beans as well. The teepee structure is up and we’re just waiting for some bean vines to grow on it.
We’re growing our lettuce a little different this year. We always grew it in big pots and it was so wonderful. We would cut it for the table and it would grow again. It was not funny at all to find that the chickens had demolished every last scrap of lettuce one afternoon. They didn’t bother it for 2 months. Then, all of a sudden… gone. We’re growing our lettuce inside the pool cage this year. I think we may have outsmarted them. The tomato bed is getting a temporary fence around it this season.
That's better.
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