AFTER:

A better angle on the actual progress - I started at this end because this is my asparagus patch. I painstakingly transplanted from our old house these six crowns, and 2013 will be the 3rd year - but I will call it 2.5 because of the transplant after year 1.5. This year, we feast! PS - I did see one baby asparagus shoot growing already.

Mia, sure looks good, but I am very jealous. My favorite part of gardening is soil prep and weeding, but the only thing I can do in my garden now is make mud pies.

Would you trade some of that Bermuda grass for some mud?

Oh, Mia, that does not look like fun. Nosireee. If the purple shoots are asparagus, I see several of them!

I'm trying to reclaim a bed I let be a "wild" bed (read, tried to grow flowers and the bermuda and weeds happily took root). I finally took the hoe to about half of the bed in the fall. I need to work on the rest of it before all the spring weeds start blooming. That bed will always be a problem because it backs up to a full bermuda lawn...that I lovingly water for my neighbors as I attempt to water my beds!

The purple looks like onion to me. I think I see last year's stubs of asparagus on the left. Looks big enough to harvest for a while this year. Asparagus will come up through a quite deep mulch. In our garden even small spears push up through 3-4" of wood chips. That was a relief to me; I was sure DH had smothered our plants the first year he piled on the chips. Of course burmuda will also come through 4" (or four feet lol) of chips unless you put down cardboard.

And in the first pic, what is the green patch on the right? Rosemary? Parsley? Both are still green in my garden.

I had a friend who once gardened in burmuda by laying down a sheet of black plastic, cutting slits and planting tomatoes, pepper, okra, even corn through the slits. OF course that prevents rain from getting down so she had to water a lot.

Mia, It is such a lot of work to reclaim the garden after grass and weeds have infiltrated it, but it is so worth it!

I'm glad you were able to make a dent in it and I am confident you'll keep working away until you have cleared all the grass and weeds.

Everything is greening up rapidly here, so I am sure weeds are erupting anyplace in the big garden where the mulch is thin. I've been working on new garden spaces out back, and more or less ignoring the big garden lately.

I do hate pulling out and digging out weeds and grass when the soil is so cold to the fingers, but is simply has to be done at this time of year in order to reclaim your soil for planting.

And, y'all, while I'm out working in the yard and garden lately, I'm seeing lots of cabbage moths. It sure seems early for them to be out and about.

Oh, silly me, that does look like onions :) My old eyes and apparently dirty glasses didn't see the connection between the purple and the green!

Larry, my favorite part of gardening is the eating, so perhaps we shall trade those tasks, hmmm? Just kidding - actually, I am not sure which is my favorite part, but I am certain it is not soil prep. I do like the planning, the day-dreaming, the planting and the harvesting. The only thing missing from my like-list is the weeding and watering and prepping.

Lisa, the purple is onion as mulberryknob (Dorothy?) says - I'm sorry, I'm not good with forum REAL names but that just popped into my head. I have several bits where the onions seemed to shrivel and die last year before doing anything, so were not harvested. This winter they have popped back out, as little bunches of three or four sprigs where I had planted only one. Am letting them do their thing to see what happens. They should set seed, but I don't know yet if that seed will self-sow and I might get onions next year. Onions confuse me very much for some reason. Bulbs, sets, plants, seeds. Ugh. Just give me onions already! And Mulberry - the green stuff in the lower right is rosemary and it's weathered just fine. I have some I had in huge pots with cannas and hibiscus that I dragged into the garage in the fall, am hoping it will bounce back as well. There are a few plugs of garlic there, too.

Dawn, it is very tedious (but strangely satisfying!) and I knew once I ignored it I was consigning myself to this task before I could do anything with it. I neglected to mulch anything except the paths last year, too, I was a busy/lazy gardener for sure. This year I will do better. Have plans to lay a path of bricks around the exterior of my plot, to create a "kill zone" for the bermuda. I am trying to keep from applying herbicides to the garden, but might do some judicious bermuda-cide in the two foot perimeter if needs must.

We also had to cut down a wild sprawl just to the left of the photo that used to have blackberries, elephant garlic and some kind of onion or chives all over, as it was overrun with tall grasses, scrub trees and honeysuckle. We weed-eated it to the ground (except the elephant garlic, I found the leaves still green so we could work around it. Am hoping the blackberries will come back and I can start them on the right foot, and train them a bit, otherwise/in addition I plan to put in some new fruit trees/shrubs to create a more perma-scape than the usual veggie plot. Our peach tree is in sorry shape and DH cut it back severely so I don't know if it will do anything this year.