LysmachiaMoon's blog: Weeds make the gardener

Not for me the chemically weed free garden, the "hired someone else to pull the weeds" patch of flowers...Oh no. The REAL GARDENER has weeds. Lots of weeds. And learns to fight the good fight.

At least, this is what I tell myself.

I have spent the past god knows how many days...they tend to blur together...doing almost nothing in the garden but pull weeds. I hoed weeds, I dug weeds, I cut weeds, I sprayed weeds, I scraped weeds out with a putty knife, I combed weeds out with a horses' curry comb (my favorite new tool!). I see weeds in my sleep. I wake up plucking at the sheets thinking they are weeds. MUST....PULL....WEEeeeeedddsss...... *snort, gulp, wake*

I've got about 3/4 of the veg garden cleaned out, tomorrow I'm going to tackle the asparagus bed. The worst...the very absolutely worst is that galinsoga....it's horrible. I cleaned out a big section of the veg about 10 days ago and when I went back to that section it was CARPETED with the damned stuff. But this is where my new secret weapon really came in handy...I bought a metal horse curry comb. It's like a few small saw blades coiled into a circle, with a handle. It works like a dream at getting tiny weeds out....you just run it over the surface of the soil and the weeds are erased. It doesnt bite deeply into the soil, so no chance of bringing buried weeds to the surface.

It's funny, but the two best weeding tools I now possess not garden tools at all: the curry comb and two different sizes of paint scrapers/putty knives. I have a narrow bladed one for close work, a wide blade for bigger areas. PLUS they're so cheap (less than $5 each) that if I break or lose one, it's no big deal.

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My garden has hit the Midsummer Blah period; the early flowering stuff is finished, the midsummer daylilies are just starting to get going. Pretty soon the coneflowers will open and I intend to cut back a lot of the salvia and other things to get them to reflower.

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I saw a small ad for a daylily farm in Gettysburg that I'd like to check out. Then I lost the ad. *LOL* So...will need to find the address....this could be added to the nursery crawl, which I'm hoping to get to next week, weather permitting.

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