war of the weeds

A busy day today but I managed to squeeze in some gardening time. It's been a gorgeous day, perfect temperatures, sunny, slight breeze, the best weather to be out in the garden.

Unfortunately the weeds are winning...this early in the season that's a very bad sign. I went out and finished cleaning up most of the front garden, did a little on the side garden and some work in the vegetable garden. Some plants and flowers poking through but mostly weeds.

It's amazing how much weeds look like real plants. For example bedstraw looks like woodruff. At least until it makes that final leap into an ugly weed. The first year we lived here I learned that the hard way after I denuded an entire patch of garden of all of it's woodruff. Three years later it has been nursed back to health and is re-propigating if that's the correct term.

And ground ivy...I thought it looked sort of like aguja or carpet bugle. Hah! Then I had tons of the stuff. And the weeds are runners so they go on forever.

The garlic mustard is about to completely take over the woods, the bittersweet and, my favorite weed (!) multi-flora rose are battling it out in the middle of the back garden.

At this point I do what I can and hope that eventually things will grow and fill in enough that the weeds won't be that noticeable. And every year I swear I'm going to get rid of more of the garden. But somehow I never seem to get around to it.

I still maintain that my life would be a lot easier if I could just teach the deer to eat the weeds. I would let them eat all they wanted, honest.