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.

Spent half an hour hoeing dandelions and quack grass in the garden. I’m cautiously optimistic about the grass situation for this year — right now, it doesn’t look so bad. But we’ll see how it looks in a month when everything is starting to grow like mad.

Also, last summer, most of my quack grass eradication efforts were spent with a shovel, digging up as much of the roots as I could find. That’s pretty hard work, not to mention that it disturbs the roots of the vegetables. This year, I want to see if using a hoe will work well enough.

Meanwhile, the tomato plants inside are getting bigger and bigger. Most of them need to move into larger pots. We’ve still got 4-5 weeks to go before we can put them in the garden, and we’re almost out of space in the house. We have to get some down in the greenhouse.

Well, it’s snowing again today, with several cold, cloudy days forecast, so I brought the two biggest tomatoes back upstairs from the greenhouse and squeezed them onto the seed-starting table. Maybe next week it will be something more like Spring….