Where there are vegetables there are also weeds. But, this year there are more weeds than vegetables.
The rainy summer we’ve been having is making me weed every single time I get in the garden. I rarely get the opportunity to go to the garden. We have rain periods every couple of days and counting in the days I have to wait for the soil to dry I end up with 3 days a week max. Those 3 days I spend weeding and harvesting. While I finish weeding the whole garden I can start weeding it again from the beginning.
Even bigger issues I have with the bottom part of the garden, it is continuously wet, keeping me from this part. The grass is starting to take over and I don’t see I’ll get the chance to clean it, I’ll probably just let my hubby cut it.
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| there are strawberries somewhere in this mess |
Today I had an early start and I started the whole garden once again. The rain we got on Friday and Saturday soaked the garden so I could do only a small part so I started with the cucumber bed.
Cucumbers are flowering and are growing, but the leaves are starting to turn yellow from all the rain and sun changes.
I’ve sown some more cucumbers, just to be certain. If this ones die completely I’ll have some more ready for September harvest.
Right below the cucumbers, there are my two miserable tomato beds. This year due to the pythium infection I’ve lost 70% of my tomato seedlings, then the cold killed most of the surviving plants and now I have around 20 seedlings plants that are in bad shape. They are really really small. The perfect example is the Rose quartz multiflora tomato. I have a determinate variety which is usually around 1m tall. This year it’s almost invisible. It has fruits and they are healthy, but the plant is really tiny.
Below the tomatoes, there is my little jungle which is the easiest to clean. The cosmoses and iberises have taken over the carrot and flower beds but I don’t really mind, the carrots are in the ground, and don’t mind the tall bushy plants since they don’t have big roots and at least there are no weeds here.
In this jungle, there is also a small part of the bed where I have a watermelon…or a melon… or who knows what. Some kind of melon it is, we’ll see when it starts to have fruits.
Next to the jungle bed, I have my pepper bed. Peppers took a hard beating from the cold weather, bell peppers recovered, some are already producing peppers but chilly peppers were devastated. I’ve only got 4 peppers left and there were dozens of seedlings planted.
The last bed I managed to clean was my baby onion bed…or it was leek. I don’t really remember what I’ve sown on the bed. I’m hoping I’ll see what it is before they’ll be ready for transplanting. If it is leek then it will stay in the garden for next year, if it’s onion I’ll pull the bulbs out and store them for next year.
I was planning to do some more work, but I ran into my well-known problem: mosquitoes.
Mosquito repellents work for a short period and the garden is a real jungle this year. There are hundreds of mosquitoes flying around the garden. I had to do a speedy harvest of blackberries and cucumbers and run out of the garden. They still managed to bite me so many times I had to take my antihistamine tablets when I got to the house, just to be on the safe side
Tomorrow I won’t be doing any garden work because the rest of the garden is still too wet for weeding, but I’m hoping that on Wednesday I’ll be able to weed the brassicas and beans before the next rain. This year is starting to feel like a real race.
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