“I Atehay Eedsway”

For those of you not fluent in Pig Latin, “Atehay Eedsway” translated into proper English means “Hate Weeds.”

Weeds drive me crazy.  I hate weeds and if I could, I would pick every single one I could find but unfortunately I don’t have the time to do that.  I fret endlessly about weeds while Steve thinks they aren’t a big deal and that there’s no need to worry about them because they’ll still be there tomorrow.  And you know what? He’s right, they will be there tomorrow but there will be more and they’ll be bigger!!

Steve and I have different methods of weeding.  He’ll attack the garden with a hoe, loosening the dirt while picking up the larger weeds.  It’s a quick, semi-effective method but not up to my standards.  I will crawl around on the ground with my weed bucket and little shovel digging up every weed I see.  It’s a time consuming method because, depending on the weed, I’ll dig half way to China trying to get as much root as possible.  I like to think my method is more effective. 

Method 1 - June 13th Weeding                                                             Method 2 - June 18th Weeding

                            

The main weeds we encounter in the garden are pig weed, stink weed, horsetail and quack grass.  The pig weed and stink weed grow quickly and are easy to remove once they are bigger and if the soil is loosened.  You have to be careful with the pig weed because it likes to play dead; it’ll almost fall over and look like a pulled weed you dropped but its still firmly in the ground.  The quack grass and horsetail are a different story.  



Quack Grass with roots



Quack grass looks like grass but has a much wider blade.  It can have an extensive mat of underground roots where multiple blades of grass grow from.  They are a perennial and if you don’t remove the entire root system they will come back again and again and again.  Thankfully, there isn’t much, if any, quack grass in the garden this year; it seems to be confined to the raspberry patch.





Horsetail between rows

My new number one enemy is the Horsetail.  Until recently, it was referred to as “that friggin’ swamp like weed”.  It is similar to the quack grass in that it has an extensive root system that is almost impossible to remove.  It likes moisture and has a tendency to grow amongst the plants making it extremely difficult to remove.  It breaks off easily so digging, in my opinion, is the best way to remove it.  Quite often when I tackle one plant by the time I get a large section of the roots, there are other plants that are attached to the same root system.   Provided the soil isn’t like concrete they are easy to dig up and remove, just next to impossible to get the entire root system.

I have finally finished a few projects that were eating up my time and as we are currently having a break from the rain, weeding is the only thing on my agenda.  I like having things neat and tidy, garden included, and having the garden look “messy” with weeds drives me crazy.  Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the weeds because I wanted it all done yesterday and I don’t know where to start.  To deal with this issue I have developed a plan of attack that seems to work well for me: I attack one row at a time and hopefully everything is done before I need to re-weed where I started.

Wish me luck!