my nemesis

This weekend has been slightly less stupid hot, so I got some yard work done. Yesterday I started early and spent about two hours weeding the blueberry bed. I thought I would be able to weed-wack most of it, but once I got out there I realized that it was too far gone for that. The bed is way on the far side of the yard where we rarely go, and we're not doing the kind of daily maintenance that we do in the vegetable garden. And so it had gotten extremely overgrown. Everything had to be pulled out or cut down. The bed is big (four blueberry plants, each 4 feet apart, and the bed is about 6 feet wide) so that added up to a lot of work. But Jane came and kept me company the whole time I was working. She just sat with me, didn't help by chewing up weeds the way Lina used to. But it was still really nice to have her nearby.

I'm not sure which was more annoying: the vines which had totally overgrown the fence behind the blueberries, or this one humongous bramble. No, the bramble was definitely worse. (These brambles are totally my gardening nemesis.) I had thought about digging it out this past spring, but I was hoping it would bear fruit so I left it alone. A few months later we had no fruit, but a mass of huge canes -- up to 8 feet long, no joke! -- tangled in each other, the other weeds, and the fence. The canes were covered with giant thorns and Japanese beetles. Ugh. At one point I tried to toss a few canes onto the refuse pile and they somehow bent back, wrapped themselves around my body, and got stuck to my shirt, pricking me all along my arm and back. And when I finally disentangled myself there were thorns left stuck in the back of my shirt, so I had to be careful how I moved until Georg came and pulled them out for me. That was no fun at all.

Anyway, in two hours I didn't get the bed completely cleared, but I got it done enough that I could feel OK about stopping. The blueberries are looking good. They're all small of course, we just planted them last fall. But they've all got lots of healthy looking growth. The smallest had been completely covered by a volunteer shrub and wasn't getting hardly any sun. But even that one is sending up new canes & I'm hoping that it will catch up with the others now. Two of them put out fruit earlier this year, but we had to pick it all off. You're supposed to let them develop root strength for the first few years. We'll have to do that again next year, but then the year after we can eat the blueberries. That is, if the birds let us.

The yard work totally wiped me out, so I spent the rest of the day goofing off. Which meant playing with my BPAL database. Am I a geek or what? I got it set up to track the ingredients in each blend in a separate table, with a report showing each ingredient, all the blends that use it, and my rating of each blend. Now I can get a sense of which ingredients work best (and worst) on me. In the process I learned how to use linking tables. The concept of many-to-many relationships had been eluding me so I'm very pleased to have figured it out. Which probably makes me sound hopeless to those of you who have been working with databases for years, but what can I say, you have to start somewhere.

This morning I went back out to the blueberry bed to clean up: stuffed all the cut-down weeds into the yard waste bin (at least, all that would fit) and then sprayed Round-up on the vines and the brambles. I hate using such harsh chemicals but in this case I think it's necessary. Then I mowed the freedom lawn, since Georg had changed the mower blade yesterday. I am so happy to have discovered the "freedom lawn" concept. No more guilt about the weedy lawn! We can pretend we did it that way on purpose!