Thanksgiving

I love the spring best overall for renewed hope and vigor. But this time of year is also wonderful. The days are more relaxed and peaceful feeling, and it is nice to look through the garden and see what progress it has made. And now is the time when we reap our most bountiful harvest! Our peach and pear trees are gifting us with beautiful, large, delicious fruit. We have plentiful tomatoes, peppers, squash, grapes, as well as some beans and raspberries. Every meal has something delicious and healthful from our garden!

Heavenly Help

I have worked this summer trying to coax my back lawn back to health and beauty with limited success. I got rid of the insects that were eating the roots, I have given it water and fertilizer and weed killer, but there are still patches that don't look very good. The best improvement in the lawn came after a wonderful heaven sent storm that soaked us with an inch of rain over several days, and brought us relief from the August heat. The yellow areas became smaller, and their color tinged more towards green, and the healthy areas thickened and turned darker green. I think it will continue now to improve, and it will be pretty again before it goes to sleep for the winter. Sometimes we just need some help from the heavens.

Weedin' the Garden

It isn't much of a stretch to see where the weeds figure into the scheme of things. Having a garden to tend gives me a frequent opportunity to contemplate their existence. I put them into categories: Some have shallow roots. I pull them out, throw them away, and they are gone. Others come out easily, but have left seeds or small roots behind and eventually reappear. Then there are the ones that are difficult to get out of the ground at all. They break off, leaving the whole root to grow back in a short amount of time. If I want to get rid of it completely, I have to dig down and disturb everything in its vicinity to get the whole thing out. Some take poison to get rid of. Some aren't really weeds at all, just plants growing in inappropriate places.
One of the banes of my existence is bind weed (also known as wild morning glory or creeping jenny). This noxious weed has roots that go down as many as 20 feet. It spreads mainly by those roots, under barriers, sidewalks, small roads, but also by seeds from the innocent looking flowers. Indeed, it is not unattractive as a groundcover, with the lacy greenery and the delicate white flowers with the deep red veining. But beware! Once this lovely little specimen makes its appearance in the garden it requires a great deal of diligent effort to keep it from choking out everything else. For me, this weed represents pride. Attractive, yes, but destructive and so very hard to get rid of.

Strengthening the Good

Wow. A lot of our back lawn is in bad shape. We have patches of brown....I have been working for several weeks to green it up. The usual applications of water and fertilizer haven't had any effect. When I inspected the affected areas, I noticed little insects that sort of hop or fly close to the ground, and webs here and there. It looks like we have an infestation of webworms, the pests that eat grass roots. I am waiting to see if a massive application of lawn pest control gets rid of them and then I can encourage the grass to revive. What I noticed about this is that we don't have any of the brown patches near the house, where the grass is sheltered from the sun for most of the day and the water it receives is enough to keep it strong and thick. Whether the bugs prefer drier soil, or the grass in the moister soil can withstand the bugs, the message is pretty clear: if I had been more diligent about watering my grass earlier in the season, I wouldn't have this problem. Another trouble is that where the grass has turned brown, weeds are trying to take over. More work, and chemicals....So much trouble caused by not taking care of the grass.