Looking out from our pantry window, you can see the progress we have made over the past five years. We’ve taken the garden from moss and violets to this thriving green space.

One of the things that happens when you make conditions good for vegetables and trees to grow – is you also make conditions good for everything else to grow – whether you want it to or not. There are several areas we have to get under control that are over grown with crab grass? Not sure, but I do know that it never grew there before, and now it does.  I do cut it before it seeds to feed the rabbit,  make our own green mulch for the compost, and green mulch for the trees and grapevines.  However, there is just too much growing and we cannot cut this by hand every day.

The experiment is to find a solution to control and/or kill off the grass where we need things to grow – and leave an area in the back to grow wild and be rabbit food and mulch.

Around the beds, we are installing a stepping stone path and mulch – we are putting cardboard boxes down, putting the stepping stones on top and mulching around them. The violets are in direct opposition to this and are coming up anyway – which is fine with me because they are a great ground cover that is beautiful and keeps other weeds from growing. We will also extend the path to define where we and other people visiting should walk. My goal, after that is to fill man extra spaces with planters, etc. until the empty spaces are growing veggies, fruit and herbs and the grass is minimal.

Around the trees we are using all of the bark mulch that comes from processing our firewood. At the end of each season we take the bark and put it out around the trees and it works really well as a weed and grass barrier and brings us closer to the goal of creating a forest floor around the trees – as if they had been there for many seasons of trees growing and falling around them.

The adventure in this is that new plants grow all over the garden and as I take my herbalist course – I am learning that many of them are an excellent source of nutrition. Part of my journey is to learn the plant names and uses and find ways to incorporate them into our lives. We know what we plant, but we leave space for the volunteers and wildlife they attract, so nothing is really a “weed” but just a friend we have yet to meet.