What Did You Do In The Garden?

[digitS']

There must be quirks to my gardening that encourage a special relationship with purslane weeds. I can begin on a piece of new ground with absolutely no purslane and it will show up. A couple years and it will blanket the ground if left to its devices!

Not the most horrible weed. Purslane is fairly easily pulled. I have the "horrible," too. I try to pull every bind weed seedling as soon as it's seen. I can't get to all of them when they grow in a ground cover. The older plants, I go after with the spading fork, how's that gonna work where there is ground cover?

Today, I will be out with the spading fork where onions have been pulled and succession zucchini plants went in about a month ago. Oxalis! I remember Marshall complaining about that weed . He claimed that the roots went to China!

It's mostly just that the part of the little weed above ground is so inclined to break off from the root. Of course, the oxalis comes right back!

I'll take the dandelion digger, too. There are sow thistles and those fall to the digger.

Steve

 

[flowerbug]

There must be quirks to my gardening that encourage a special relationship with purslane weeds. I can begin on a piece of new ground with absolutely no purslane and it will show up. A couple years and it will blanket the ground if left to its devices!

Not the most horrible weed. Purslane is fairly easily pulled. I have the "horrible," too. I try to pull every bind weed seedling as soon as it's seen. I can't get to all of them when they grow in a ground cover. The older plants, I go after with the spading fork, how's that gonna work where there is ground cover?

Today, I will be out with the spading fork where onions have been pulled and succession zucchini plants went in about a month ago. Oxalis! I remember Marshall complaining about that weed . He claimed that the roots went to China!

It's mostly just that the part of the little weed above ground is so inclined to break off from the root. Of course, the oxalis comes right back!

I'll take the dandelion digger, too. There are sow thistles and those fall to the digger.

Steve

purselane i would leave alone here as a ground cover if i could get away with it. Mom does not like any weeds left at all. as a somewhat edible plant that needs no extra watering and it shades the ground and helps protect from the rains/wind i would like to just leave it alone if it isn't near a vegetable plant. it is not easy to pull here from the clay so i often just scrape them quickly and leave them as mulch. sometimes they can reroot or regrow themselves and i get them again with the scraper. i suspect the seeds are so tiny (like their cousin the moss roses) that they can easily travel by all sorts of methods: animals, sticking to the bottom of the shoes, on garden tools, wind, rains. i have no idea how persistent the seeds might be in the soil seed bank. i have tried repeatedly to get moss roses to grow here as we would surely like to have them as a ground cover but they don't last. they just start growing too late in the season and get scraped up with the purselane sprouts. hard to work around them when we have so much space to keep on top of.

we do not have bind weed but we have several others i'd like to eliminate (speedwells of a few types and some long viny plant which does not get very big flowers at all but drops a lot of seeds), virginia creeper, poison ivy, wild grape vines, thistles (sow and otherwise), a solanum of some kind (purple berries), many grasses and crab grasses and oxalis for sure. among the most annoying plants, but can be scraped and buried and eliminated with repeated scrapings if you are consistent enough to get all the plants before they can drop their numerous seeds. uprooting the plants and leaving them to dry out in the sun is what i do if they are at the root spreading stage. if worse comes to worse smothering is always an option here and i do use that technique as a last resort if i don't need that space for something else right away.

right now i have a lot of crab grass trying to get going along the edges i've already cleared. a quick scrape can often do it in. i should just cover those edges with some paper i have but i don't have anything to weigh it down with to hold it in place.

dandelions we remove but again not my choice, i don't mind them, the bunnies also remove them along with the wide leaf and narrow leaf plantains and clovers. just that some gardens are not bunny accessible.

a weed we leave a lot of places is pinks and their cousin called Flashing Lights i let wander around, both of them can drop a lot of seeds. the oxalis and purselane like to sprout around the edges of those and then try to take over.

i have a lot of weeds i could be digging up and burying right now in the rather large NE Garden but i'm not quite ready to jump into that yet. it is being mowed to keep it from getting tall, but that is about it.

the other day i was weeding the thyme and most of what i had to get out of there was the birdsfoot trefoil and some of they yellow annual clovers (aka black medic) that always enjoy trying to take over. those i will sometimes pull the seeds/flowers off of and leave for worm food if i have the time. otherwise they go into the bucket to be put on the weed pile and the birdies and mices, etc. can pick through them for the seeds.

 

[digitS']

sticking to the bottom of the shoes,

I was crouching in the shade of the pickup on Friday, readying myself to load some buckets.

There in the gravel of the neighbors' driveway where I park were 4 tiny purslane plants. I can't imagine them surviving the grinding of the gravel with the passage of vehicles. Survival for a day or two and probably from seed carried on my shoes .

Another "weed" that travels like that is Kentucky bluegrass. I mow weekly, probably at too low a setting. There are a few of this tiny plant setting seed in the lawn through most of the growing season. Obviously, the seed is carried on my shoes. There they are at the path into the garden. Leave them awhile and they are like a runner carpet! (Leave them a few seasons and I bet that they would occupy all permanent paths.)

@flowerbug , do you have black medic?

Steve

 

[flowerbug]

I was crouching in the shade of the pickup on Friday, readying myself to load some buckets.

There in the gravel of the neighbors' driveway where I park were 4 tiny purslane plants. I can't imagine them surviving the grinding of the gravel with the passage of vehicles. Survival for a day or two and probably from seed carried on my shoes .

Another "weed" that travels like that is Kentucky bluegrass. I mow weekly, probably at too low a setting. There are a few of this tiny plant setting seed in the lawn through most of the growing season. Obviously, the seed is carried on my shoes. There they are at the path into the garden. Leave them awhile and they are like a runner carpet! (Leave them a few seasons and I bet that they would occupy all permanent paths.)

@flowerbug , do you have black medic?

Steve

yes, that is what i've been calling yellow annual clover. i didn't know what that name was so i looked it up - learn something new every day! we have it in a few locations. i usually try to get it out before it drops seeds all over since it can sprawl. if i have time i will pull the seeds off it and then leave the rest of the plant as worm food. if there are a lot of seeds i carefully pull the plant and put it in the weed bucket.

pull those weeds from the drive as if you leave them to drop seeds you'll soon regret leaving them be.

the purselane here is just starting to get some flowers on it. i'm not sure if it is the cooler nights or shortening days which signal this.

the garden i was just working on (the North Garden) has thousands of purslane plants in it, not too many grasses (since i scraped the surface and buried them) and some radish and turnip plants. also there are a few buckwheat plants flowering but the deer keep eating them so i'm not likely to get too many seeds from them. next year i'm going to get a few flats of moss roses and put them around this garden to see if they might get going in there and persist. if i can get them to drop enough seeds... it would give the purselane some competition.

there wasn't too much oxalis sprouting so that was a good sign.

i would like to mow at a higher setting - the management objects. it is best to mow fairly high as that is how your grass gets the energy to grow and keeps the ground shaded more.

one particular area that would benefit a lot from mowing higher here is along the farm field to the south where water can sometimes flow across the grass before it gets directed by The River Nile into the large drainage ditch. it has been flooded/used quite a few times this year so far.

 

[SweetMissDaisy]

Picked a gallon and a half of blackberries in my berry patch. Mmmmmmm....... so many more to come on, too!

 

[Prairie Rose]

Too busy at work to even think about gardening the past few days....also we got two inches of rain since midnight, so no gardening today! I have an appointment with the vegetable bed my next day off....it is time to rip everything out. I have lost all motivation to can and preserve, so pulling back to what we will eat fresh and no more. I am ready to start the fall cleanup, plant my garlic at the end of the month, and put everything to bed for the winter.

My attention is wandering to other things now that the days are getting cooler, I have other hobbies that are perfect for the fall and winter season. The goal is to get everything buttoned up and the new raised beds for the veg expansion installed by the end of my vacation in october. I put it off too long last year and the weather turned before I could do any of it.

I hate doing fall cleanup in early spring!

 

[ducks4you]

WHAT!!!! NO GARDENING TODAY!!! Pish, posh!! I will be weeding and getting muddy. I am, after all a Duck!
Glad I rode Buster Brown Yesterday bc it was dry in the North Pasture.

 

[digitS']

Harvest! There is little time for anything else .

Along with all the green beans coming off the second planting, there will be a light second harvest of first planting bush beans. But, I shoulda got a string around that bed long ago! Cut down corn stalks to give us some room on their northside for picking and to give the stalks extra time for decay before the tractor guy shows up.

That's a quick job with a corn knife. I looked for an online picture of what I mean - it's just a small sickle on a long handle. Tractor Supply sells one called "Groundwork." To me, that is the secret of their use. Realizing that working close to the ground, I will hit it sometimes.

I have the blade nice and sharp using a round file but not the tip. Why bother? The part of the blade doing all the work stays sharp and I proceed through several rows at a good pace ... only hitting the ground with the tip now and then and not letting that bother me - slash slash slash slash slash slash thunk slash slash slash .

We had Chinese dinner last night and my cookie said that I would be "showered with good fortune." The fortune teller must not have seen my eggplant and pepper patch. I don't know if I have ever seen the plants so small this late in the season. DW made spaghetti the night before with our first Italian sweet pepper. Imma gonna miss those this year ..! The Super Chili came home, not half filling a sandwich bag. Oh well, there are plenty of those dried from 2018. A difficult start for peppers and eggplant from which they just haven't recovered.

Steve

 

[ducks4you]

Harvest! There is little time for anything else .
That's a quick job with a corn knife. I looked for an online picture of what I mean - it's just a small sickle on a long handle. Tractor Supply sells one called "Groundwork."
Steve

Gotta get me one!!

 

[flowerbug]

rained out a few days and also taking a break after going through the bean patches and running errands/shopping...

my small berms/ridges in the North Garden worked as designed and very little water ran off any place i could tell. the transplanted creeping thyme is still alive and i am contemplating moving another sliced off chunk of the already established edge but it looks so nice as it is i hate to do that. it does much better when moved as a chunk of about six inches across as compared to what happens when i try to get smaller pieces going. i think the community nature of it helps shade the ground and keep it cooler and moistier. (yeah, i know that's probably not a real word but i like it anyways )...