Mass weeding.

One of the fun things about a sudden change from normal cool spring to super hot is the explosion of life. That also means an explosion of weeds. In this photo you can see a profusion of god knows what in with our garlic. The quantity of weeding that we had to do was a little intimidating, fortunately it wasn't just the Lady of the House and I working on it. It also led to us doing some calculations and making some new decisions about our gardens.

Here is the Critter providing "expert" help to our housemate Lucas as they were doing weeding together. You can see just how much weeding did get done, though I didn't remember to get an overall shot of the weeded gardens. Thankfully the Critter is mostly good about not pulling up or standing on the things we don't want him standing on. As he gets more confidence and capacity than he currently has I'm sure we're going to have to keep a close eye on him as we do future weeding. The other thing I want to note is just how helpful it is to have a third pair of hands. Especially with a toddler around. Lucas made a lot more work possible both with the work he did, and the attention he allowed us to divide by helping keep an eye on the kid. Community helps with child rearing, and homesteading.
We're hoping to have a lot less in the way of future weeding to do though because we've decided to make a big change. We're going to start using mulch, and not just waste straw and hay mulch from the rabbits. We're starting to use bark mulch. Part of this comes from the fact that hay was so hard to get ahold of lately we were very actively avoiding wasting it and having much waste so we don't have much to put down. The other part comes from the fact we actually for once have the money to spend $50 on our garden. For scale, that one expense is what we've spent on our garden in the previous three years. We haven't gotten the garden beds mulched up yet, but as soon as we do I'll have photos of that for you. As a nice side effect it should be much nicer looking.

On a complete digression from the weeding and gardening, we have a new and more thorough appreciation and awareness of the bug around our homestead. The Critter notices so many small things and loves looking at and interacting with the bugs of one sort and another around our garden. While we tend to be aware of pests around the garden, I think that with a small person around we're going to be likely to see a lot more of the small things that are closer to his level. We'll be back on Thursday with photos of mulched garden beds and a run down of what we got in the ground over the long weekend.