This is what most of the north end of the New Herb garden looks like, a thick, high mass of chickweed and other plants. There really are walkways and beds with herbs in there, somewhere.
This was the walkway between Rows 6 & 7 that I tackled on Wednesday. My general helper was here and she tackled the walkway between Rows 5 & 6. Before we started them, we restored the top walkway after the septic work.
This is lady’s mantle under the veil of chickweed in Row 6. We had to get the map out to know what was under the mass of weeds.
This is the lupine I planted in 2020 when I restored this bed after the construction. I can’t believe it has survived this long. Lupine typically doesn’t here.
This is how far we got with 3 hours work. We were just clearing the walkways, not working on the beds much, besides removing the worst of the chickweed.
In this closer shot you can see where we gave up digging the mats out and just started pulling the foliage off. It was taking far too long to dig the mats. We’re hoping they die, but with the coming rain on Thursday, they will probably re-grow 6”.
In the top walkway you can see where I have 3 batchelor’s buttons volunteers. They survived the digging, weeding, and septic work. They have buds on them now. There was 1 found so far in the walkway I worked on.
I’m hoping I can get mulch on them as we finish them, in hopes of delaying more weed growth.
My son managed to get the front pasture fence and the head of the driveway weedwacked on Wednesday. He’s still got the yard, around the barn, and 2 more pastures to do.
In one of the tiny cracks in the walkway, a volunteer alyssum is flowering, the first one. This was one of my husband’s favorite flowers.
On Thursday it’s to rain all day. I don’t have helpers coming and plan to spend some of the day repairing the bagger’s catchers. I’d taken one off to do last time I mowed, and went all the way around the yard with just 1 catcher and wondered why there were so many clippings…Sigh…So fixing them is on the list.