Five weeks since I was here last; hard to believe. But the weeds are evidence. The winter weeds are filling the gardens in patches and scatterings: dandelion, bittercress, vetch, buttercup. I worked for a couple of hours at hand-weeding, with a break while I trimmed down what was left of the summer flower stems. We did a pretty thorough job over the past year in controlling the winter weeds, so this crop has to be coming from seeds in the soil from prior years when the gardens were neglected. Garden maintenance is much easier if consistently weeded. It would also help, a lot, if there was a robust green ground cover to smother the weed seedlings. Ground covers, though, have a couple of drawbacks: they can make the beds look untidy, or they can fail due to deer browsing. I've included photos here of one of the patches of weeds and of two potential ground covers. We have a patch of yarrow starting to spread as a ground cover, and we have many violets which could be a nice ground cover except the deer keep it trimmed almost to the ground.
Winter weeds
Winter weeds
Yarrow
Violets
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