Ending and Beginning

So I was out in the garden today, trying to stay ahead of the quack grass, digging it up with a small shovel and a spading fork. There’s still a lot of quack grass out there.

Then, I got to a place I had covered with corrugated cardboard and wood chips last summer in an effort to kill the grass. There were a few blades of grass showing through, so I dug into the cardboard. And underneath it, there is a heavy mat of thick, strong quack grass roots.

It gives me the creeps to even think of if, and I take back everything I’ve written about the quack grass problem not being too bad this year. It’s going to be another long, hard struggle.

What about some kind of frame with chicken wire through which you could sift topsoil? I wonder if that would be a way to get those roots out.

Transplanted another 11 tomatoes into 4″ square pots and moved the 23 largest down to the greenhouse. From now on we have to remember to open the outside greenhouse door in the morning and close it at night. Those down in the greenhouse are approaching the size of the plants they’ll be selling in garden centers a month from now, so I’d say we started the seeds a couple of weeks early.

Also got another 48″ 2-bulb fluorescent fixture going down in the greenhouse. It’s on that built-in timer I put down there ten or twelve years ago. I may move one of the three fixtures we have upstairs down to the greenhouse.

I bought 4 more rolls of 28″ x 50′ fencing yesterday.

I set some of the tomatoes outside for a few hours in the afternoon to start getting them used to full sun.