Saturday, April 18, 2009

Getting Started...Finally!


Thank God for power mowers!




It was looking pretty darn intimidating at the beginning of the 2-week 'vacation' Steve and the kids got for Spring break. With baseball or rains keeping us from getting to the yard every weekend up till now, the weeds had taken over the yard and had already gone to seed...eek!


We don't plan on using any kind of chemicals in the garden so I'm sure we'll be fighting the weed battle all summer. Hopefully our plans for drip irrigation will help to keep some of the seeds from germinating and we'll just deal with the others as they come up.




We started with a hand tool and used it for some of the taller plants....


... but mostly relied on good ol' John Deere to tear down the majority of the weed invaders.


We followed with a rake (the bag had to be taken off because it filled up too fast) or a smaller mower and deposited all the remains in a pile to be used as compost...the plan is to add some horse manure to help heat it up and kill off the seeds.





It was a long hard couple of days...

...but we got it done and ready for the rototiller.

2 comments:

Amanda said...

Oh, that was SUCH a familiar scene! I hired our neighbor kid to mow a few weeks ago, but everything was back up again last week. The spots where I put down cardboard under mulch are doing well, though! I just needed more cardboard.

Are you getting nutgrass yet? The compost we brought in had a TON of it! Ack! That I have to handpull between the veggies. No more imported compost after this year! Our own piles are plenty, thank goodness.

Maureen said...

No nutgrass that we can see....pretty much every other kind of weed tho :)

And DITTO on the compost issue; It will be SO nice next year to be using our own homemade 'dirt'.