ENJOY YOUR GARDEN PATH & THE INEVITABLE MAINTENANCE

Sometimes I am tempted to create more gardens (which I absolutely do not need) simply to create more garden paths. I don’t know why I have a love affair with paths, but I collect pictures of them and ideas for future paths with the same zeal that I collect garden ideas.

My tastes in paths are nondiscriminatory. I love them whether they are made from flagstone, brick, gravel, wood, grass and sometimes concrete. And I particularly like paths that are featured multiple materials. What I’m finding, though, is that other than those made of a solid surface, paths all need maintenance. And the more material mixing you do, the more maintenance they need.

Few kinds of paths have my heart like flagstone paths. I’m particularly a fan of flagstone with moss or another durable, “steppable” ground cover growing between the rocks. In one of the early iterations of the path to the garage (which back then was just a path through the garden opening onto the lawn), I tried this and year after year the ground cover failed. I tried Irish moss, creeping thyme and a handful of other plants and although all of them would thrive in summer, none could handle what our Wisconsin winter had in store for them. That’s really no surprise as we were asking for a Herculean effort from them. This was a path that was regularly trod upon (i.e compaction is a factor), shoveled (no plant wants that) and frozen and thawed (the stones would heat up in the winter sun) repeatedly. 

This is the area of the path that I've already cleaned up this year. Blissfully weed free.

When I extended the path all the way to the garage a few years ago as part of a complete renovation of that part of the yard following the renovation of our house, I embraced a new design: The same flagstones (although mixed with recycled bluestone from my grandmother’s house) with small gravel between the stones. I laid a thick base of limestone screenings (also called road base in some places), set the stones on it and filled in with gravel (you can read about the process here and see what it looked like right after I finished it here). 

Up until now, the maintenance has consisted of just topping off the gravel from time to time and using my weed torch to knock out any small weeds that might pop up. This year, however, the weeds have been healthier and I was somewhat lax about keeping up with frequent weed burning missions. Weed burners are fabulous for a lot of applications, but they work best when you are killing small weeds frequently, rather than trying to take out well-established plants. 

When I resigned myself a few weekends ago to take on the path maintenance project I’ve been putting off for months and started trying to hand pull weeds, I found that the reason they were all growing so well is because there was a lot of soil in all that gravel. And that is the issue with so many paths. Even when you take care to prevent weeds from growing in cracks, dirt gets in there and then you’ve lost the battle.

The areas that I haven't gotten to yet are not nearly so nice. Grass, both from the lawn and nearby ornamental grasses, dandelions and all manor of other weeds have taken a firm hold in what used to be gravel but is now mostly soil.

And as far as I can tell, there is no way to prevent this. Landscape fabric certainly doesn’t work because soil just gathers on top of it. It gets there by wind, messy gardening, blown in by the lawn mower, but mostly, I’m guessing, from plant material getting on the path and breaking down. In other words, it’s basically making compost. 

The story of what happened next with my path isn’t particularly exciting or illuminating, and it’s certainly no “Quick tip for path maintenance.” I flipped up every stone, dug up the all of the gravel/soil mixture surrounding it and reset it (which wasn’t difficult as the limestone screening base seems as good as ever). Then I came back and refilled the cracks. Fortunately we got way too much gravel delivered when I did the paths in the circle garden this spring so I had plenty left. 

I should clarify. I’m only about halfway through this project. It’s boring and laborious, so I’ve been taking it in chunks and hope to finish it up before the end of the month. 

But here are my takeaways about garden paths:

1. Unless it's a solid surface, such as poured or stamped concrete, all paths will require maintenance, and even those will probably need power washing once or twice a year.
2. If you do have a path that requires maintenance, do a little bit frequently, rather than waiting until it becomes a big project. Staying on top of my weed burning could have put this big job off a year or more.
3. Consider your climate and how frequently you'll use the path when you decide what material to use. Maintenance is one thing but completely redoing a path is expensive and time consuming.

If you're curious about my weed torch, which is one of my favorite ways to tackle weeds, here's the setup I use. These are links to the products on Amazon and if you buy from them I may receive a small commission to help support my plant habit! Thanks for your support.

GARDENERS, KNOW THY ENEMY (aka THE GARDENING SIN CONFESSIONAL IS OPEN)

Not too long ago I offered absolution of garden shopping sins and many of you took me up on that offer (don't worry, I'm an ordained minister of the Internet Church of the Garden so I'm entirely qualified to offer such absolution). I felt so much better about it that I ordered 40 willow rods the other day, and I only feel a little guilty about it. (It's Margaret Roach's fault.)

Recently a book showed up in my mailbox for review called Weeds of North America ($35, University of Chicago Press). Sounds like it would be good for insomniacs, right? I think perhaps it shows what a garden geek I've become that I am ridiculously excited about this book and know that it will be at the top of the garden book rack forever.

This isn't going to be one of those books that you pick up in the middle of winter for a jolt of inspiration. It's going to be a book whose pages are dog-eared and muddied, signs of being flipped through with hands straight from the garden, as I try to identify the latest unwelcome intruder in my garden.

But before I get into the book, I need to make another confession. I have done something horrible with a weed.

When I started gardening at our cottage about 12 years ago (it will be 13 years in June that we've owned the house but I didn't do any real gardening the first year), I was a novice gardener. I was also a poor gardener as we had tied up just about every penny we had in the house. I had big ideas and no budget so I was thrilled with whatever flowers I could find existing in the garden or free from friends and family.

What is now the circle garden was once a vegetable patch and when I started gardening there it was filled with a random assortment of weeds and shrubs that seemed to have been stuck in with little thought as to design.

One of the flowers that was blooming there was a delightful lavender number with cup-shaped flowers extending up a stem. It practically oozed cottage charm.

In one of our frequent walks around the yard, my mom said, "You know that's a weed, right?"

Although I was a decade removed from being a teenager, I gave a reply that could have come from any sassy 14-year-old's mouth.

"A weed is just a plant in the wrong place," I said. "I think it's pretty."

And my mom, who had been down this road with me on more than one occasion replied, "You'll be sorry."

Gardeners, listen to your mothers!

I'd never properly identified it until Weeds of North America showed up. That pretty flower is Campanula rapunculoides, aka creeping bellflower. Here's what Weeds of North America says about it:

Creeping bellflower is a weed of gardens, fence lines and occasionally cultivated fields. It is shade tolerant and able to survive in crops. It is a serious weed in lawns, where it competes with the turf, robbing it of moisture and nutrients.

Life cycle: Perennial reproducing by creeping rhizomes and seeds; plants may produce up to 3,000 seeds.

In other words, I'm screwed. I have tried to rid my garden of this plant. I even dug up an entire section of the circle garden a couple years ago in an attempt to dig it all up. It came back. I haven't allowed it to flower for several years now, but the rhizomes all but ensure that it will always be there.

It would be one thing if I alone was made to pay the price for my gardening ego that allowed me to think for one second that I knew better than my mother, an experienced gardener. But my sins go much further.

Since there were several plants sort of plunked in that area when we got the house, most of those were rehomed. And it also served as a holding bed for awhile, so while I was renovating other parts of the garden, I would stick plants there while I decided what their future was. I moved several ornamental grasses there when we ripped out the enormous bed of them off the patio. And then I decided I didn't have a need for all those grasses and I did what gardeners do: I shared them.

Some of them went to my mom. Others went to an ornamental garden in the middle of downtown that is maintained by volunteers, one of whom is my mom.

You can see where this is going, right? Creeping bellflower is starting to pop up in new places, namely the places where I so generously donated those ornamental grasses. I have infected other gardens and I feel horrible about it.

Had Weeds of North America been around 12 years ago, that probably wouldn't have happened. I could have looked it up and I would have known to get it out of my garden immediately instead of letting it flower (and therefore seed) all over the place.

Although it may be a book with a title that could probably become a joke on a late-night talk show (by the way, I don't fault the title; I like a reference book that says what it is outright), it is filled with beautiful photos by France Royer. Yes, weeds can be beautiful, especially when they are safely captured in the pages of a book much like Hans Solo frozen in carbonite. The writers did an excellent job of sticking to the main facts. Being concise is important in this book because, let's be honest, there are a lot of weeds to cover.

And that—the sheer number of weeds to be covered—is this book's biggest challenge. How do you begin to organize them all? Authors Richard Dickinson and Royer have done a yoeman's job, organizing them by leaf arrangement and flower color, but it can still be a little challenging to find what you're looking for. Fortunately the attractive layout and excellent photos make flipping through this book enjoyable.

There is no mention of how to rid yourself of the weed once you identify it. But then again, I also understand this: that's not the book's purpose. Also, I suspect the book's authors would be unwilling to wade into a controversial stance on when to use chemical solutions and when not to.

I've been waiting for this book.

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OK, folks, it's time to confess your weed-related sins? What's the worst weed-related thing you've done?

FIVE WAYS TO DEAL WITH WEEDS (WITHOUT CHEMICALS)

Even though we are in that sort of sweet spot of summer when there isn't much to be done in the garden other than enjoy all the hard work, there is still one job that must be done: weeding.

I have a lot of weeds in my garden. Honestly, this year I never really got out in front of them. I manage the areas farther away from the house as well as I can and keep the gardens closest to the house the tidiest. So I don't profess to be a champion weeder. But I know that weeding is something every gardener must do and here are the five ways I manage weeds without chemicals.

When hand-pulling weeds, try to grab them as close to the soil as possible. This jewelweed comes out easily with hand pulling but some of the other nasty weeds growing in this area don't pull quite as easily.

1. PULL 'EM BY HAND
I probably deal with 80% of the weeds in my garden by hand pulling them. Some weeds, like Jewelweed, garlic mustard weed and even oxalis can just be pulled out with a couple fingers so long as the ground is soft. The key, of course, is to pull out the whole weed, roots and all, otherwise you're just making more work for yourself.

Pros: Requires no tools, can go quickly, can be done with a wine glass in one hand.
Cons: Sore back, sore hands, doesn't work for all weeds.

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Wild violets are considered a weed in my garden and the only way to really get them is to dig them up.

2. DIG 'EM OUT
When hand pulling won't do it, that's when I turn to my hori hori and dig them out. Dandeloins, quack grass, plantains, tree seedlings and anything else that doesn't want to come out easily gets this treatment. It's slower than hand pulling but you can be sure to get the entire root.

Pros: Guaranteed to get the root out, very salt-of-the-earth kind of gardening.
Cons: Time consuming, laborious.

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3. HOE 'EM
Some gardeners are big hoe fans, but I'll admit to be relatively new to world of hoes. In fact, I only really have one proper hoe and I like it because it has sharp corners that I can dig in to pop out more deeply rooted weeds. It works better for young weed seedlings, as it's difficult to dig the hoe in deep enough to get the roots on larger weeds so if you're a person who likes to do a little work more frequently, hoeing would probably work well for you.

Pros: Easier on the back, fast
Cons: Hard to get the root so needs to be done frequently

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This area was covered in cardboard in May and has done a great job smothering out the weeds all summer. I still haven't gotten around to covering it with mulch. 

4. SMOTHER 'EM
This is my favorite method for dealing with large areas infested with weeds. I often use this for areas I intend to plant in a year or two but I'm just not ready to deal with yet. Although I've used multiple layers of newspaper (or newsprint on rolls, which is much easier) in the past, lately I've been using mostly cardboard, which is easier and works much better but is perhaps a little more difficult to find. I cover up the cardboard with the least expensive wood mulch I can find to make it look a little more presentable. You can also use plastic or even an old piece of carpet to smother weeds, but I prefer paper or cardboard because it breaks down naturally and you never have to worry about removing it in the future.

The light brown mulch at the top of the photo is an area that I covered in newspaper. I didn't have enough plants to fill this new garden area all the way to the back of the bed, so the cardboard plus mulch keeps it looking tidy this year and next year I'll be able to fill it with divisions from elsewhere in the garden.

Pros: Quick, effective, manages large areas easily.
Cons: Material collection (cardboard or newspaper) can be onerous, mulch to cover it can add up in cost.

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5. BURN 'EM
There's no doubt that this is the easiest and most fun way to deal with weeds although it is certainly the most dangerous. I bought a large weed torch a  year or two ago after I decided I wasn't getting enough power from my small weed torch. This one hooks up to a large propane tank (like you connect to your gas grill) and you pull it behind you on a hand truck. Because heat is obviously non-selective, you have to be careful not to get too close to anything you don't want to kill. When you use a weed torch, the goal is not to incinerate the weeds, but to desicate them so they die back on their own. To do that, I just hold the torch on them until the foliage gets bright green. Within a day, they'll be shriveled up. I pretty much only use the torch on my stone paths and the cracks in the patio, but it works like a charm. I did burn myself pretty badly just by touching the hot torch (turned off) accidentally to my leg this spring so you should probably be smarter than I am and wear some protective clothing (and not flip flops) and maybe have a hose handy when you're going to get crazy with the weed torch.

Pros: Fun, easy.
Cons: A good chance you could burn down your house or send yourself to the emergency room.


What's your favorite weeding method?

The garden will keep, summer will not

We had our annual master gardener picnic last week in which we visit members' gardens and then eat a lot of food. I arrived early at the main garden to help set up the food and got a good look at the garden and property and realized that its owners had been putting in a lot of time getting it spiffed up for this event. And that's why I don't think I could ever have this group at my house.

If you look around my yard you will see there is plenty of gardening to be done. There are weeds. Endless weeds. In the garden and now, especially, on the edges of the garden. There is deadheading to be done, pruning to contain some overzealous plants, edging, watering, you name it. Suffice to say there is no dearth of gardening that needs to be done at my house.

Last weekend was about as perfect as summer weather gets in these parts. Sunny, mid-70s, a light, warm breeze and basically just beautiful. It was certainly as good as weather gets for gardening.

But good gardening weather is good everything-else weather (except some type of house cleaning).

So I should have been planting these perennials waiting for permanent homes (my goal is to go into winter with nothing in pots this year)...

Or pulling out the oxalis that is particularly aggressive this summer ...

Or disposing of the piles of weeds stacked up around the garden ...

Or cutting back the floppy Russian sage ...

But I didn't do any of those things. In fact, I'm not sure I so much as picked up the hose to water the containers.

Instead I paddleboarded (lots), went for a sail, sat on the beach looking out over Lake Michigan, swam in the lake, swam in the pool (my first swims of the year, sadly), cooked lots of yummy food on the grill, celebrated my parents' 50th wedding anniversary and sat outside just enjoying the summer night until well past 10 p.m.

Monday morning I went outside to water my neglected containers and looked at what a mess the garden was. I saw the wilted container plantings, the piles of weeds laying a foot from where they had been pulled, the weeds that enjoyed a few more days in the ground and the spent blossoms hanging from stems waiting to be deadheaded.

And I didn't regret not doing any of that all weekend.

Summer is short. You have to savor every bit of it while you can. Even if that means letting the gardening chores go undone for yet another day.

Friend or foe?

I have a confession. I might be growing huge weeds in my garden on purpose. Well, sort of on purpose.

Gardening guru Margaret Roach likes to identify her weeds and her reasoning makes sense: If you know what it is, you will know how to get rid of it. And I can safely say that I know most of the common weeds in my yard very well. (As for how to get rid of them, the answer seems to be the same for all of them: pull them out one by one, by the root and try like heck to keep them from coming back.) But I don't know all of them and frankly, I guess I don't really want to know at this point.

This spring the garden was is a big mess. We've had cooler temperatures and oodles of rain, which apparently is the perfect scenario for weed growth. I wasn't planning to mulch this year (I don't like to do it every year), but I finally gave in because I'm sick of pulling weeds from the same places repeatedly.

When I was weeding an area of the main garden I came across a trio of plants that I wasn't sure about. Friend or foe? They happened to be close to where I grew Agastache 'Blue Fortune' last year and the fact that there were three of them in sort of a clump lead me to believe these were intentionally placed there. There was no other sign of the Agastache and I thought it was a pretty hardy plant to I would be surprised if they didn't come back. I looked at the leaves and that the leaves of another Agastache I had just brought home from a plant sale and they looked, well, similar.

So I left the mysterious plants and they have grown. A lot. One of them is a full 5 feet tall, which is taller than I seem to recall the Agastache being last year, although I have found reference to it being up to 4 feet tall.

The mystery plants do have square stems, which is good sign for the "friend" column as Agastache has square stems (as part of the mint family) but as they've grown, they bear less resemblance to the new Agastaches I picked up this year.

I won't have to wait long for this mystery to be solved. The plants have buds and will bloom soon. Who is placing bets?

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If you don't follow The Impatient Gardener on Facebook or Instagram, you might have missed the new addition to the family. It's a temporary one, though. A robin (I'll never accuse them of being the smartest birds) built a nest in the fiscus tree spending the summer on the deck within a week of it going outside. She laid an egg a day starting Friday and now has a full clutch of four eggs (according to what I can find, this is the number robins prefer) and she'll now start incubating them. In about two weeks there should be babies. Since the nest is located a mere three feet from the patio table, it should be easy to keep an eye on what's happening.

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June was a busy month and I didn't get to blog nearly as much as I wanted to (nor did I spend much time visiting my favorite blogs), but hopefully I'll do some catching up in July. I've been thinking about it, and I often talk about "keeping it real" here, yet I'm reluctant to show you much of the garden unless it's looking its best. Well no more. Sometime over the next week, I'm going to take you on a little tour of the garden, however it is looking when I do it. I'm not sure if it will be photographic tour or a video tour (the downside is that then you have to listen to my Midwestern twang), but I'm going to do it, weeds and all. 

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The Garden Appreciation Society is going so great and I'm having so much fun with it. Look for this week's link-up tonight or tomorrow morning.

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And, lastly, today marks the day that Google Reader went away. Hopefully you're still finding the blog, but to make sure you don't miss any posts, either subscribe to receive it by email (at right), or check out a new feed service. I've been using both Feedly (which didn't work this morning thanks to the huge hit it took from Google Reader shutting down) and Bloglovin, which you will go to automatically if you hit the "Subscribe" link up there on the right.

Killing weeds organically: sometimes you just need a little elbow grease

I thought it might be time to check in on my little weed-killing project. If you recall, this was an area of the yard that we are trying to reclaim for a bit of grass. It was overrun by weeds, primarily creeping Charlie, dame's rocket and garlic mustard weed.

If you look back at this post from a couple weeks ago, you'll see that I have been attempting to kill all these weeds in the most organic way possible. That consisted mostly of a combination of the weed torch, spraying full-strength vinegar on them and cutting them very short. I followed that process twice and I think I doused them with vinegar three times.

And here's what it looked like after not touching the area for about two weeks. You can see that a good amount of weeds are gone, but, especially in the front, several were doing just fine. For the most part, the creeping Charlie seemed to be the most resistant and a few dandelions were being sticklers as well.

There are chemicals that can deal with creeping Charlie, especially if you're in a situation where you can kill everything and don't have to be selective. Still, for reasons spelled out in the original post, not to mention satisfying my own curiosity, I wanted to give an organic approach a try. Certainly this isn't the easy way out, but you can see that it at least sort of worked.

After I took this picture I went in with a hoe and rooted out almost all the remaining weeds. Since this is very sandy loamy soil. I was easily able to get the hoe into the root zone and really attack. We raked up all the leaves and finally planted some grass seed.

I know we'll continue to deal with weeds in this area, but part of my master plan is to grow healthy grass that doesn't make a nice place for weeds to live. Just as weeds provide competition for the things we want to grow, grass can do the same to weeds. So that's the goal. 

A demanding mistress

The garden is a demanding mistress this time of year. Despite our early spring when I thought I had a head start on gardening projects, I feel I'm behind again. The beds still need to be edged, plants moved, plants planted and, of course, weeding, weeding, weeding. Daffodils are fading and need to be tied into little packages so I can tolerate letting the foliage stand for awhile. The Virginia blue bells have all flopped and need to be removed.

My goal is still to have things more or less in control by the second week of June so that the rest of the summer can be managed with just a bit of gardening here and there. The past week has been a brutal schedule of going to work in the morning, coming home at 6, gardening until 8, eating dinner hopefully by 8:30 or so, then passing out. I always intend to take a day or two off from work during May to get ahead in the garden, but that can be a challenge since our deadline gets tighter with Memorial Day in the mix and I already take a day off to help set up our master gardener plant sale.

The mini greenhouse is overflowing with new hostas, annuals waiting to be put in containers, pots of perennials for the master gardener plant sale and a tray of sprouting seeds.

I thought I had an early start on some zinnias, but now it's looking like they may be the last to the party.

Although I've not potted any containers up (until this week it wasn't reliably warm enough to put annuals outside), I've been buying annuals and keeping them in my mini greenhouse because I'm afraid the good stuff will be gone by the time I get around to planting.

I've taken a more systematic approach to my containers this year. I take more joy in designing my containers than I do in almost any other part of gardening but some years I get so enamored with all the different combinations I can make that I buy plants willy nilly and end up with extras that I just stick in the ground. This year I made a list of what I intend to put in each container and have been carrying it around with me to every nursery I go to.

Where I've come against a brick wall, however, is in the containers themselves. I'd like to add a couple pots to the deck this year, with mandevilla to vine up the posts for the pergola. I want pots that are tall enough that they don't jump out and grab someone's leg, big enough to plant a few things along with the mandevilla (licorice plant, a small grass and a hot pink Superbena, according to my well-worth container list), and be relatively contemporary in style. I also have to be mindful of the weight because they are going on an elevated deck. It seems that local nurseries are only stocking glazed ceramic pots these days which are heavy and require more care than feel like giving. Fiberglass and other similar materials seem to be called for but I am astonished by the prices these things go for. Pretty soon I'll have to bite the bullet and just pony up the money for something because it's high time to get planting.

And then, it's back to weeding.

Free your garden (and yourself) from the grip of Roundup

F  or almost five years now I've been an almost entirely organic gardener. The caveat is there because I keep a bottle of Roundup in the garage for particularly offensive weeds that seem immune to the more friendly ways of deals with their demise.

No more. The Roundup is going away (through my county's hazardous waste disposal program). You won't catch me telling you what you should or shouldn't do very often (I'm very much a to-each-his (or her)-own kind of person), but I'm going to do it right now: Get the Roundup out of your life.

Roundup is the best-selling herbicide on the market so if you use herbicides, odds are you're using Roundup. It's made by a company called Monsanto (which also brought us a little herbicide you might be familiar with called Agent Orange). I could go on for a long time about all of the things Monsanto does that I do not disagree with, but I won't. If you want to know more though, you can check out some of these posts from Garden Rant here, here,  and here.

But here's the problem: Roundup is bad stuff and we're finding out just how bad it is. Genevieve over at North Coast Gardening addresses the issue here.

Check out this wheelbarrow full of weeds pulled from my garden last spring. It was a lot of work, but I got them out of the garden never to return by pulling them out, root and all, no chemicals involved.

Now I know you might be thinking, "How bad can it really be?" Well, first of all, there are all sorts of instructions about what sort of protective clothing, eyewear, etc. you should be wearing before you use it. How many times you have actually followed those instructions? If you're like me you might have taken the time to throw on sunglasses first. Not good.

As you find from reading Gen's blog post, the active ingredients in Roundup have been found to be endocrine disruptors which, plainly put (in my most unscientific sounding language), can screw up the reproductive system. That's bad for animals and really bad for humans (of all ages).

Even if you're a naysayer who thinks that this uprising against Roundup is one more example of organic goodness gone wrong, I ask you, why take the chance? Why even tempt fate if there's even the slightest chance that this may be true?

Because, you know, there are a lot of other ways to get rid of weeds. How, you ask? Well here's where we can start:

1. Pull them. Pulling out the entire weed, root and all, is the simplest and most effective way to get rid of a weed. Period.
2. Prevent them by mulching (in your garden) or by using a pre-emergent natural herbicide such as corn gluten meal (on your lawn).
3. Burn 'em. Yep ... you can burn weeds with a weed torch like this. I think this sounds like tons of fun, especially for guys (who seem to be prone to having pyromanic tendencies).
4. Boiling water. This obviously works best on an area where you want to kill all vegetation rather than spot treating just a few weeds, but it does, in fact work after a few applications.
5. Horticultural vinegar. The North Coast Gardening article linked above has a coupon code for 30% off a new product called Weed Pharm, which is super strength vinegar in a spray bottle just waiting to take the place of that nasty Round-Up. Like boiling water it will kill anything it comes in contact with it, so you want to be careful to shield nearby plants that you don't want to kill. The safest way to apply it is probably to brush it on, but that's far too tedious for me to be bothered with.

If you don't want to open up the link to the North Coast Gardening article, here's the link to buy Weed Pharm. If you use the code WEED30, you will receive 30% off through March 11. I've not tried it yet, but I plan to order some and give it a go.

If you're still using products like Roundup, just try going without them this spring. I bet you'll find that you don't really miss them much and just think of the peace of mind you'll gain knowing you're not putting yourself in potential danger. That is, of course, unless that weed torch gets away from you.

A letter to my future gardening self

Following is a letter to my future self.

Dear Erin,

How's the garden growing this year? Did you finally put something in that spot right in front that you've been saving for something "really great"? Did you remember to spray the plants with the deer/bunny repellent BEFORE they started eating everything?

The answer to those questions is probably no, but this letter addresses a more important issue. Remember back in 2009, when it had been about three years since you had mulched? Remember how the year before you put down a three-inch thick layer of compost over the whole garden and you were so pooped that you sort of let things go a little bit?

Well don't forget this:

Yep, that's a picture of YOUR weeds. Not the weeds from the entire yard, or even just one garden. Those are the weeds from about an 8-foot square area. Remember how you spent an entire weekend digging up those weeds? The first nice weekend of the summer, when the rest of the world was out sailing and hanging out on the beach, and you were in your best trailer park outfit, covered in dirt, sweating in your garden and praying that no one stopped over and actually saw you like that?

Pictures don't lie. Don't let it happen again. I'm warning you.

Sincerely,
2009 Erin