In Jo's Yard - 14 Weeding Starts Early

Remember ‘way back’ Entry #4, when I said “I imagine I will look forward to mornings with gloves and clippers.”  Feeling a little naïve.  All that pine straw is supposed suppress weeds, but every morning, I see unwanted sprouts of grass!  Thistles, cheat grass, crab grass, purslane, swine cress and spurge! Kirsten from Green Isle Gardens helps me identify a few kinds of weeds.  I think the spurge is the worst.  It imitates the frog fruit and creeps out in a wide circle almost overnight!  I find a website to help me identify MORE weeds:  https://www.preen.com/weeds/fl    

If you don’t count the bending-over, the weeds are easy to pick out since the frog fruit plants are just coming in and have not spread out.  I can spend 30-60 minutes every morning pulling weeds out, just to see more appear the next day.  I tell myself that once the frog fruit fill in, and I can minimize the watering, the weeds will diminish.  Oh, hope springs eternal!  In the meantime, at least I am enjoying beautiful cool mornings, outside.  I don’t have a dog to walk, but I chat with the dog-walkers who pass by.  “Frog Fruit – it’s a native ground cover!”  “It’s coming along”  “It’s filling in”  “You can mow it like grass, but it doesn’t require the water, fertilizer, pesticides that grass does.”


                                        Spurge at the top, Purslane with the yellow flower