Finished Weeding Entire Garden and Picked First Zucchini

Sorry I have not written in quite a while but it has been incredibly busy around here.  I have spent the entire past week just weeding throughout the entire garden including blueberries and strawberries.  Weeds are a constant problem and more nuisance than anything else.

The good news is that after spending each and every day weeding the entire garden area I can now focus on caring for my plants.  Although weeding will continue throughout the rest of the season even if we get rain or not.  I will just have to make sure not to let the weeds grow wild before removing them or place a thick mulch around the worst areas.             

Some other good news is that today I picked the first of many zucchinis and is the earliest I have ever picked one of these vegetables.  I normally pick them after the fourth of July and have never picked them before.  I had it for dinner tonight and I can tell you that it tasted real sweet and delicious.  I normally don’t like zucchini, but when it comes from my garden it always worth the effort.  Take a look at how big this zucchini was.

This zucchini ended up weighing exactly three pounds.  Not bad for just one of these vegetables.

As I mentioned earlier I decided to weed the entire garden every day until all the grass was removed and not siphoning off nutrients from my plants.  I had left on weeding my zucchini plants from my last post.  I completed that this past weekend and made sure that I loosened up the soil around all my squash plants.

I then worked on my blueberries which usually doesn’t take that long because I just use a simple electric trimmer to get the work done.  I need to be careful though that I don’t strip the bark from the plants otherwise it will die.  I try to get all the way down to the ground making certain that this grass will not grow back quickly.

Before Weeding Blueberries

After Weeding Blueberries

As you can see it had gone a bit wild in there and it was crucial that I got rid of most of the big stuff immediately.  What I could do is dig up the soil and place down a thick layer of mulch or straw to prevent any of these weeds from ever growing back.  This is just a simple option that I could look at.

Yesterday I finished up the weeding of the garden with the strawberry section.  Strawberries are always a pain and usually take the entire day to complete mainly because you have to be carefull of the plants and their shallow roots.  I also decided on thinning them out as well because there were too many that were bunched together.  I removed as much as possible to make room for the stronger plants.

Before

After

At the moment the strawberries don’t look very good, but this is because the soil is extremely dry and I disturbed some of them when I removed plants that happened to be near them.  This will pass in time and with the recent mulch I added to them they will perk up in no time.

Here are pictures of the entire garden and what it looks like after I have removed all the weeds as possible.