Make-Work

I have wonderful things sprouting in my cold frame now.



A chinese cabbage and some spinach left over from last fall, some chives, and lettuce and chard that I just recently planted...



...and weeds. Oh, my dirty fingernails, the weeds.




I'm getting the feeling that I'm going to spend the whole summer painfully regretting that composted horse manure I layered on my raised beds.

I told Nathan this and he said, "Well, yeah. Horse manure IS the seediest kind."

Oh how we all did laugh.

I don't mind a little weeding. I have methods that make it tolerable. Raised beds are generally easy to weed. Things are planted closely so as to shade out weeds, and it easy to sit on the edge and pull what few weeds grow. And as for the rest of the garden, I just mulch it heavily and I have almost no weeding to do. What weeds get through are easy to pull up (and there are some that I let grow for eating when they aren't hurting anything. Yes, many weeds are delicious! Try adding some lamb's quarter and purslane to your salad... Yum!) I was chided once by an experienced gardener, "Oh! Don't use straw to mulch your garden! You'll just add weed seeds!" And my response was, "Well, I already have weed seeds! That's why I'm mulching!"

So I don't care about the horse manure on the garden. But my raised beds don't get mulch. And those are where I start the tiny, little, tender things that can be difficult to weed.

Normally, I don't make a big deal about weeds. But this...


...this is enough to make me weep into my garden gloves.

And it's even worse that I recently weeded half of that bed, and then when I watered it, apparently I got a whole new crop of weeds.

So I weeded it again today. All those teeny little weeds. I had to have great concentration to make sure not to pull out any of my little seedlings. And then I watered it all reeeeal well...

...To make sure the next batch of weeds will get a nice, happy start.