Weeds

I’ll admit I’ve been kind of lazy the last few evenings. I went out last night just to water the plants in containers and take a quick tour through the vegetable garden. The new plantings of beans and corn have both germinated. I was a bit amazed to see how much faster the seeds germinated in warmer weather. Soil temperature does make a difference! I knew it made a difference, but this just reminded me. I wonder if I cover the raised beds early in the spring to maybe warm them up faster, if it will give me a jump start on the season? I’m adding this to my list of things to investigate this winter and try next spring.

Anyway, back to me being a bit lazy… I then went over by one of the perennial beds, and I could hear the one of the weeds saying something like this:

“Look at me, I can reach for the sky! Look how tall I am! She’s over there messing with that vegetable garden again, not paying us any attention, so we can grow and grow and get really tall, flower, set seed and really take over this bed. Oops, here she comes, duck down, don’t look so tall, maybe she won’t notice us.”

Yes, I did notice that I’ve got some “weed issues” in the perennial garden and around the bird feeder. I pulled a few of those weeds and threw them down on the ground where they had been growing, just to let the others know that I’d be back to take care of them, too. The picture above is of some these darn weeds. Yes, I am willing to show that not all is paradise in my yard. This is the spot where I pulled out/killed the moneywort that I had innocently planted. The good news is that the moneywort is mostly gone, the bad news it has been replaced by these weeds. I’ll take care of the weeds this weekend.

The night before last, by the way, I wasn’t exactly being lazy, I was actually mowing the lawn when my lawn mower quit on me. Quit on me! After I took it in this spring to the place where I bought it to have it tuned up and serviced, it quit on me! In years past, with other mowers, I never did that maintenance thing. I just kept using the mower, adding oil if it got low, but I never had the spark plug changed, air filter changed, or anything like that. And I never had engine problems. Now, I try to treat the mower right, by the book, and this is how it behaves. I called the place where I bought it and had it serviced, and they said it would take 3 weeks or more for them to get to it. 3 weeks! I then very patiently explained how I bought the mower from them less than 2 years ago, and how they had tuned it up just a few months ago. Viola! I am getting “priority service” and I hope to have my mower fixed and back by the weekend, before the back yard, which is what I was cutting when the mower croaked, starts to look like I am letting it go back to its original field state.

Needless to say, after messing around with the mower for most of the evening to see if I could “will it” to fix itself, I didn’t have the time or desire to do anything else. That’s how I try to fix things that I don’t know much about, by the way, I use “mind over matter” also known as ”hope for a miracle”!

Anyway, in spite of a few trials and tribulations and some weeds and a bit of laziness on my part, good things are still happening in the garden. The zucchini are starting to form some flower buds, the Stella de Oro daylilies are going insane trying to out bloom each other, and did I mention the night blooming cereus has seven buds on it!