Week 36

Spring is definitely here. Bulbs are popping up all over the place. Things are starting to grow again. And by that I mean weeds. The mulch I put on the vegetable garden to suppress weeds hasn't really worked and the weeds are all poking up through it. I guess I didn't layer enough on. But now I'm not sure what to do. Put more on? Or dig the mulch in? Probably the latter, although as well as weeds there are also potato plants growing too and I don't really want to disturb them.

With Spring I also need to start thinking about what to plant in the garden. There are a couple of things putting me off planting anything. First is not knowing quite what to do. Second and most important is the concern that the dog will dig up and destroy anything I plant. Third is that anything the dog doesn't get, the rabbits probably will (unless the dog chases them away).

P and I have had a couple of productive days on the property recently. On Sunday he got out and went round the fields tidying up overhanging trees and ripped out an old fence that had come down long ago and been grown over with grass.

Today I got down to the lavender field again. It had rained a lot overnight and everything was wet so I couldn't continue on with the line trimming I was doing last week. Instead I started removing the debris from underneath the plants - lavender trimmings, grass clippings, leaves and general debris had all accumulated on top of the weedmat to form a nice layer of dirt, on which the weeds were growing. Completely negating the point of the weedmat. It was long, slow, hard work to clean it up. It took about 45 minutes to go down one side of a row, and 45 minutes to come back up the other side. Which means that in the three hours I spent today, I only got two full rows cleared out. It was a lot tougher than I expected. My arm muscles are killing me now. But hopefully it is worth it and will mean less weeding over the summer.

With each full row taking an hour and a half, I'm not sure how I'm going to find time to do the rest of the field. Maybe this will have to be an ongoing project. What I'm not sure about is how much of the debris I cleared away today has built up in the last 9 months, and how much is older than that. If it's going to be this much work every year then I'm not sure what to do. With only one day a week available to me, I can't really get very much done very quickly.

-M