Thistles

I enjoy gardening. I grow flowers, herbs, vegetables............... and also weeds. When I moved into my house there was lawn, areas of weeds, a couple of lilacs, a number of maples and spruce trees along the edges, a line of peonies, and one lovely heavily scented pink rose. I have steadily whittled away at the lawn, and replaced weedy areas with beds. In the front I have a number of perrenials in a border along the driveway and in shady beds in front of the house. They get augmented with some annuals every year, and every year their care gets easier.

The vegetable garden is another story. Every couple of years I expand it too. But the garden is an annual garden of course and I have enriched the soil greatly, adding much compost and tilling it with a monster of a tiller, named "The Beast".

Ohio has a great climate for growing vegetables, abundant summer rain and heat.

There is a problem though. Weeds grow very well and to giant size extremely quickly.

Winter is long and cold and you are not generally safe from frost until Memorial Day. May is unpredictable. We had hard frosts this May on the 6th and 7th, and on the 22nd, and 23rd. Aside from that this May was often warm and wet, often in the 70s and 80s.

I was busy. My spring term ends in early May. So the first two weekends in May were tied up in grading and finishing classes, and I left on the second weekend as soon as I turned my grades in to go out of town for the week between spring and summer terms. I was home on that Sunday while I hurried to prepare my syllabus and lectures for the first day of my intensive summer term course. The next weekend was Memorial Day weekend and I had a speaking engagement in New Mexico. I returned from that on Monday. The next weekend I had other commitments. So, there was a whole warm wet month without me preparing my vegetable garden beds. I did clear a corner and get some lettuce in.

The weekend before last I attacked the weeds, yanking them out of the rich loose soil in the beds, and cutting the tall grass in the heavy clay between the beds. Weeds there had to be dug out. Part way along I took pictures as proof. Some of the thistles were 6 feet tall!









I worked hard all weekend clearing the beds. Then I carted in 14 wheelbarrow loads of compost from my compost pile, and finally hauled out The Beast and and wrestled it into tilling it all. Finishing putting in plants and whacking down weeds around the compost area and along the edges had to wait until this past weekend. My back muscles are still sore, but it is done!












After a dry week thunderstorms have pounded us with rain. The weather has been ranging from warm to hot. I need to get mulch down and pull new weeds. I have put before and after pictures here. In a few weeks I will add in "growth" pictures. The pictures are looking up from the back of the garden towards my house. I already have lettuce ready to eat and soon there will be much more.... which reminds me, I need to get my bean trellis up.

And I have been working on my herb garden, but more about that later. I'm not done yet.