Better Than Plastic

Saturday I spent a few hours cleaning out the front flower bed. Needless to say, it was full of weeds and dead leaves. I ran out of space in the garbage pail. Hubby would prefer that we throw some weeds away instead of putting them in the garden, and these weeds were not 'goat friendly'.

I was dreading the thought of shoving weeds into the big green plastic garbage bags. It doesn't matter what I do or what I put them in, they get holes and are difficult to move.

Hmmm.... We just brought in a load of grain and alfalfa pellets for the animals. Hubby and Vet2Be just filled all the 55 gallon drums and put the feed bags into the garbage.

I thought those empty feed bags would make much better bags to hold the weeds than the green plastic lawn and leaf bags.

The are!

They don't hold quite as much as the lawn and leaf bags, but they are soooo much sturdier that I can pack them really full!

I've been saving the brown paper Purina bags to put around the vegetable garden plants in the spring. We couldn't think of a good use for the IFA bags, but I think I'll be saving them for a while! They make a much better garbage bag for lawn and garden garbage than the plastic ones.

Weeding and Tilling

Still no camera. It spent about 10 days in Korea with Son1 while he was testing for his black belt in Haidong Gumdo. Right now it is sitting on his desk with the card full of pictures from his trip.

Today we spent lots of time weeding! My goal is to have the whole garden weeded by Friday as well as some fencing repaired and a shelter enlarged.

My nephew is visiting from Connecticut for three weeks, and we have a foster son here this week as well. The house is full of boys and I put them all to work instead of letting them sit around on the computer!

Today I weeded for three hours. Vet2Be, Nephew2, and Foster weeded for about two hours. We got a bunch done, but there is still lots to do tomorrow.

Son1 tilled for about 6 hours and got the area in front of the barn nice and soft. We had old straw spread over most of the area as well as piles of muck from the stalls. We are hoping to plant grass in the fall so that next spring we will have more area in pasture for animals. It will reduce our animal feed bill in the summer if we have all the animals on pasture and none on dry lot.

We don't have much of a garden this year. It froze three times this spring. We thought we had lost all the raspberries and the blackberries, but they surprised us and came back to life. There is no fruit on the fruit trees, though. Son1 really misses the nectarines. There are a few tomatoes planted and a few peppers, but nothing is growing very well. I was happy to see grapes on the grapevine, although two of the plants look kinda sick and yellow.

The flower beds in the front all need weeded, too. But they will have to wait until next week.

Weeding....

I am still way behind on weeding! Some days I wonder if I will be caught up by Christmas or not. If you are behind on your weeding, these photos should make you feel a bit better. I don't know anyone whose flower beds look as bad as this one does.

I've always got excuses... death in the family, homeschooling, church responsibilities, practicing guitar or piano, going to the doctor ... there is always something that gets in the way. And I am usually happy to let stuff get in the way since I don't enjoy weeding that much.

It took me about 40 minutes to clear the area that is just dirt. You can see behind it how much more weeding there is to do.

Here is a picture of the whole flower bed. There are many days that I would love to just spray Round-Up on the whole thing and then turn it into a parking area. We need the parking area anyway--but we don't have the cash for it right now, so it will stay a flower bed for another year.


Here is the same bed from the road. There are some few beautiful plants in there, if you can see them among the weeds; Peonies, Sea Heather, Lavender, Iris, Day Lillies, a small climbing rose on the fence, and a few others that I don't know the names of. This side of the flower bed looks better than the other side because one of the neighbors across the street has to look at it. If I make myself weed, this is usually where I start.

I'm sure I'll be out there again tomorrow. Hubby is on a business trip for two weeks, maybe I'll find time to get this bed cleaned out and mulched before he gets back. It's a good thing that he doesn't care about stuff like weeding flower beds (or cleaning house), because then I don't feel like such a failure!

I think the flower beds all look best when they are covered in snow!