Larry, I suspect you are not the only one. I guess the downside to all the recent rain is that it interferes in mowing, edging and weeding. If we can stay dry another day, maybe all the existing puddles will soak into the ground and I can mow tomorrow. Unfortunately, rain is in our forecast for tonight and tomorrow---and I'm not complaining.

I did a little weeding in raised beds yesterday but the grade level planting areas have soil that is not nearly as soft and fluffy as it is in the raised beds, so if I try to pull weeds in wet ground there, a lot of soil comes up with the roots.

I did dig out some bermuda grass in the back garden that had sprouted and grown quickly. It was at the clay end of the garden that has been too hard to even rototill--I have taken to calling the soil at the end of the garden dirtcrete.

All in all, having it be too wet to mow and weed is not the worst thing on earth. I'd rather have wet soil than dry soil any day of the week.

Dawn

I've been weeding as fast as I can, but I can never catch up :)

I need to mow tonight when I get home before the next round of rain comes and the grass is taller than me!

Some of my nutsedge is 18" tall, but its in clusters or odd strips throughout the garden. Bermuda is regrowing in some spots. The best I can do is pull it a little bit every time I'm in the area. And the Johnson grass with this rain! The other day, the best I could do was unplug the Johnson grass trying to go to seed. I really hafta conserve energy, depending on the day's tasks and my physical limitations.

But the real truth is.. I have such a large garden area being worked by someone who has multiple herniated discs.

You're not behind. You're doing a remarkable job despite that shoulder!

Weeds? Oh yes - they are the other green things that grow after we get rain, aren't they..... I think that is why I picked up several gallons of gas the other day. Some for the weed eaters and some for the mowers. Forgot to get diesel for the tractor so I can mow the bar ditches - guess I'll have to go to town tomorrow for that. The purple thistles (bull thistles?) are thicker than hair on a dog's back! And of course, if anyone on the north or south end of the section fails to mow theirs down, the seeds just visit everywhere.

But, I'm not going to fuss about the weeds, because if they got enough moisture to grow, then the grass grows, too. It may still be really short, but it is green and growing. Haven't had to put out any round bales of hay in the last 2 weeks. Life is great!!!

Mary

That is good Mary. I love driving across the panhandle and seeing green and its all so clean after these rains.
Larry I constantly feel like I am behind. The careless weeds are so thick I thought about seeing if I could find a recipe. I picked and pulled and finally gave up since I have so many other things to get ready for my kids coming this weekend.
The garden really looks good if you overlook the careless weeds. I could just tell them that its there on purpose.
kim

Bon, Nutsedge is hard to get rid of and it took me several years to rid the garden of it by digging it out with a trowel, taking great care to dig down deeply enough to get rid of the tuber (often referred to incorrectly as nutlets, though they are not nuts) so that it would not send up new shoots and regrow. In most cases I could find the tuber by digging down maybe 7-8" but in some cases I had to dig down about 10". If you are pulling nutgrass, you'll never get rid of it because the plants pull out of the ground, but leave the tuber behind.. You have to dig nutsedge to get the tubers, which is time-consuming and annoying.

I've also been digging out both Johnson grass and bermuda grass that are trying to come back in the garden, and so far having better success keeping them out than in previous years. For a while, I think we were too dry for them to make much of an effort to infiltrate the garden, and now that we've had rain, the soil at least is moist enough that they are relatively easy to dig out right now.

Light rain is falling right now and has thwarted my plans to be out in the garden early today, weeding, weeding, weeding. I wouldn't mind working in the light rain, but we have thunder and lightning and I know better than to work outside with lightning occurring.

I hope you got your mowing done, Lisa, because the rain is back.

The ranchers have been mowing and baling here, Mary, and for some of them I am pretty sure this is the second cutting. They seemed in a hurry this week to mow after the rain that fell earlier in the week and before today's rain arrived. I noticed the thistle seed blowing around earlier this week, and the few thistles we have at our place have just started to bloom.

Kim, You could tell your kids the weeds are there on purpose to serve as a trap crop for pest insects. When the pest insects show up on the trap crop, you can kill them before they reach your garden plants. I have lambs quarters and pigweed growing just across the driveway from my front garden. I didn't plant them there and I don't want them there, but I'm leaving them there for a while because the grasshoppers love them. I'd rather fight the hoppers on the weeds there than on the plants inside the garden. Still, I'll have to cut down both those types weedy plants before they set seed or we'll have a million of each.

Despite receiving 3.5 to 4.5" in various parts of our county earlier in the week, we had three fires at the same time yesterday---a large wildfire, a small grass fire (only an acre or so was burning when firefighters arrived) and a structure fire (not necessarily related to the rain or lack of such). In a way, the wildfire and grass fire were related to the rain in a backwards sort of way. Or, to state it more clearly, we have worse fire problems in the week after the rainfall than in the week before it fell, which illustrates perfectly how rain during drought is not always as big of a blessing as we think it will be. Because it rained, and even though we have not seen much visual green-up in yards and fields yet, I think people thought it was safe to burn brush piles or to do prescribed burning of pastures, and in those two cases they lost control of those fires because there had not been much green-up yet. Our yard, which gets watered occasionally, has shown some greening up since the rain fell, but the pastures that don't get irrigated have shown only the very teeniest-tiniest bit of green-up. The ground has slurped up the moisture like crazy but our soil moisture still doesn't look that great on the soil moisture maps. I'm hoping today's rainfall, which so far is light and not amounting to much, brings more greening up of the plants in the pastures. I think the rain earlier this week almost fell too late to bring a big turnaround immediately. Prior to the rainfall, I looked at our relative greenness on the map and it showed 76%, which surprised me. I didn't think our relative greenness was that good. Yesterday I looked at our relative greenness and now it shows 44%, which likely reflects what our conditions were like just prior to the beginning of the rainfall. I expect next week we'll have a higher number, assuming we eventually get the greening up that should follow the amount of rainfall we've had.

I had hoped to mow today, but now it looks like it probably will be Saturday at the earliest as the mower is broken and Tim has to fix it before any mowing gets done.

I can't mow, can't weed, it is raining, I am stuck indoors and the Fall/Winter Seed Catalog from Territorial Seeds is sitting here right beside me. That's a bad combination and pretty much guarantees I'll be doing some seed shopping. Still, I'll take rain in June over sunshine any and every day of the week. The rain won't fall forever and we won't be behind on routine yard and garden maintenance for long.

Dawn

Dawn - Thanks for the suggestion to look on Amazon for the refills for my OFF clip-on insect repellant. Found several sources. For some reason, I just never thought to look there.
Mary