Monday, April 25, 2011

What the...?

Recently I noticed that there is a bumper crop of seedlings in my raised vegetable beds.  Normally this would be a great thing but, the veggie seeds I had sown were already growing.   My beautiful beds are infested with weed seeds!

I have recently been smug about using my own autumn leaves gathered from the maple trees and dogwoods on my small property.  I use it in my own compost and in preparing the vegetable beds.  I also used some horse manure suitably composted.  Until two days ago I thought i had made the perfect combination to create my raised beds, take that expensive ready made compost!, take that weeds and unwanted plants!  As usual smug self satisfaction turns around to bite one in the butt.

I don't know what type of weed or plant this is (after all a weed is just a plant  in the wrong place at the wrong time).  They are everywhere, including in the spot where I put parsnip seeds to germinate later than the radishes.  Now I can't tell if the seedling are parsnips or weeds.  I am going to have to figure out where these came from.  I am pretty sure it was from my own stuff because the horse manure was well composted so the weed seeds should have been killed.  On theother hand it would be nice to still use my own stuff without having this problem.  I can easily not get this manure but I really want to use my own materials to make compost.  I will keep you up to date on these developments.

Meanwhile, it looks like some of the potatoes in the bag are growing!  I hope this works out.  There is nothing like new potatoes and fresh peas steamed together with a hint o butter.

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