Search and Rescue

A few times here, I've bemoaned the failure of my native plant meadow, which was overrun by crabgrass and enchanter's nightshade a month after I planted it. Things may not be so bad, though. In roughly the northern 1/3 of the meadow, a good number of wildflower seeds appear to have sprouted (with Black Eyed Susans showing up the most), and many of the transplants are blooming or on the verge of it. That was also the area where the nighshade was thickest; might it actually have helped our wildflowers by crowding out crabgrass and leaving open space at ground level?

In spare moments over the last week or so, I've been thinning out the crabgrass and nightshade to give the wildflowers a boost. I'll locate a desired plant or sprout, then clear a space around it to give it more sun and remove competing roots. I was pleasantly surprised to find one patch where I couldn't do this--there were too many wildflower sprouts to simply pull up weeds by the bunch. In that case, I didn't mind work becoming slower and harder.

Of course, the center section of the garden, the sunniest, is basically a crabrass desert. Starting today, I'm going to pull out a large section of it and try to put a fall spinach garden where it now stands. Just a bit late for that, but I probably can pull it off. I've heard that you haven't eaten spinach until you've eaten autumn spinach, and I look forward to confirming that.

Back to school a week from today. It'll be a pretty busy week, since my prepatations have been interrupted for the last couple of weeks. Last time I tried to load things onto my course web pages, I wasn't able to--I hope that's fixed, or things are going to be even harder. Between class preparations during the day and working on our porch at night, fishing is probably going to be out of the question this week, along with any other leisure activity. Except blogging, of course.