Perfect weather for greens.

The grass is getting out of control with the nearly every other or every third day rain we've been having followed by hot sunny days. I'm going to actually have to mow the law instead of using a sickle and feeding it to the rabbits. Just too much greenery! Not a thing I thought I'd be saying, but there it is. We've been trying to keep on top of the weeding. In the bare beds I haven't mulched yet that's tough, though the garlic is going gang busters as you can see.

The peppers in the weeded beds are doing very well. There isn't as you can see a lot of weeding to do in the mulched bed. This bed hasn't been weeded since we put the mulch in a little while back. I'm very happy with the mulch so far. That said, we have found a few spots that haven't been quite properly mulched and they are showing up quite clearly. As you can see Below there is a pepper plant being overwhelmed by grass and other weeds around it.

Below Right you can see the quick 30 second weeding around the area, and re covering with mulch. It's going to need some more detail care, but that gives the pepper plant more light with a very quick weeding. The mulch has made a huge difference, and having the bark mulch instead of the hay mulch has also led to a lot fewer random grasses sprouting which is the problem with using the waste hay mulch, it has other seeds floating around in it. Cost wise we'd be happier not having to do bark mulch or just using the left over bark from the bucking and splitting of firewood, and in the future I'm going to be trying to preserve bark for that purpose, but for now it's exactly what we need. The other advantage of doing it this way is that it is a more consistent look which is actually something that's nice. Our garden has been the "homesteaders hacked it out of the hillside however they could" for some time now. I'm really enjoying trying to make things look a little better and more unified as much as we can. We aren't looking for perfection obviously, but we'd rather not look like we're just desperately scratching out a living on the side of a hill, however true that appearance may be. Having a pleasant looking environment is positive for the psychological health of everyone who lives in it.

Something we did this weekend in a break in the rain is thin out the mustard greens. Can you tell? Yeah, we can't either. We cut, pulled roots from, blanched, and stored about 6 big bowls of the mustard greens, and we have far more than that left. As we have an hour here or there we're going to try to cut and blanch a bunch of the mustard greens in dinner sized servings so we can have those later when they aren't growing. It's impressive just how easy blanching and storing mustard greens actually is, and when our kitchen is a little less messy I'm going to get photos of doing so and post a walk through on how it goes. That will also let us show off the beautiful purple color of the water you get when blanching the red mustard greens.
A last photo in the, weeds are going crazy category, this is a weed on the hugulkulture bed, and it is about 4.5 feet tall! That is a thistle plant, and I think it's still early enough for us to eat the weeds as long as we handle it with care. We haven't eaten thistle before but I'm curious how it is going to taste. When we do cut it down and eat it we'll post and let everyone know how it goes. If it beats me and wins the fight, the Lady of the House will post about the results! Seriously though, that's a big thistle plant and I'm going to have gloves and long sleeves when I'm harvesting it.