The Weed Rout Continues

The great push back against the weeds continued today with a vigor. As the rains finally slowed down enough again for me to put on a full scale attack these last few days, much progress has been made as I reported yesterday. The hard part now is that I have entered the last few areas where the weeds had pretty much taken over completely. This requires more labor as I have to hand pull the weeds while being very careful not to get carried away and take out the plants I am trying to liberate. Once I locate and free a plant I then have a supply of mulch handy to get it covered right away.

For the first time this season I was also able to get a few wheelbarrows full of dried and cured grass clippings which greatly supported the reclamation effort. The punkin/water and musk melon gap is now about 90% liberated and I even made a big dent in the pepper sector. I have also managed to get most of the plants covered with the cooled off clippings and was able to put some fresh cut clippings out where they won't do any damage to anything but weeds. One more mowing session and all mulching will be complete. The hard work will be finished and only touch ups will be needed to keep things growing. Sadly I ran out of mulch material so the last few areas will have to be hand weeded until more can be gathered.

The tomatoes are really taking off now that the heat has set in and they are requiring at least an hour every evening tying up loose stems to the trellis. Soon they will be so full the only thing that might creep up through their cover will be the dreaded BINDWEED. And yes there is plenty of that around this year as well. Part of my reasoning with putting down some hot fertilizer/mulch in the walkways is the hope that it may burn up some of the bindweed shoots. We will see.

This year's tobacco seedlings have been hardened off the last few days and should be ready for planting this weekend which will officially mark the end of the new plant season and put an early end to rush week on the garden. Next week is going to be bees once again as several of the new hives are needing some extra accommodations already. My reserves of wooden ware is almost used up so I am going to need to start building more as well.

It certainly is nice to at least finally have a year when things come together again. The rains were a real pain but at least they can be worked around as long as you don't let yourself become over whelmed by the work needed. It's been over a year since I got to see a new hive actually build up again. I never want a repeat of last year that's for sure.

The new hay field is sprouting like crazy and looks really good. Next year will be a bang up year for hay off that field. There is still one very small section where a gate used to be that I need to level out and I can't get that done yet because the ruts there are still full of water and a baby snapping turtle. Just another item on my to do list.

First things first though and tomorrow I am going to go peek into a few stalls that haven't been used in forever and see what kind of mulch I can pull out of there. Maybe I can get everything covered without waiting for the grass to grow more.

Keep Prepping Everyone!!!