Battling the Wire Grass

Sunday, March 12, 2006

It's Sunday evening and the stiffness and soreness is beginning to set in from all the digging I did today. It was a great workout though.

With weather in the 70s, Michael and I were able to accomplish a lot in the garden these past two days. He cleared out almost all of the wire grass that had accumulated along the fence between our plots and the two neighboring plots to the east of us. It was a major project that involved taking down the fence, digging a deep trench, removing the pesky wire grass, laying down newspaper, filling the trench with several loads of wood chips, and replacing the fence. Whew! I get tired just writing about it.

I dug up the bed where we are going to expand the herb garden. Wire grass from the neighboring plot had been invading from underneath, and the only way to get rid of it is to dig it up entirely.

I also set out two of my broccoli plants (seen in the foreground of the photo). I set out one of them on Friday night so it could get acclimated, and would you believe, the next day it already had whiteflies on it! A bit discouraging to say the least. I think it's because we didn't have a harsh winter. All the bugs are still around -- and now they are hungry.

So today we bought some organic, biodegradable, insecticidal soap. (Our community garden is all organic, so we can't use chemical killers, which is a good thing.) This concoction has garlic and peppermint in it. We'll see if it works. If it doesn't, I think I will just skip the broccoli this year and plant something else. It is too early in the game to get discouraged.