Weekend Weeding

Spent the entire weekend weeding the gardens. I always forget how much work it actually is to pull up weeds, but there is an inherent satisfaction in popping a weed that does not belong. It's also gratifying to pull away dead branches and leaves to see new growth peering out of something you thought was dead. I was so happy to find new growth on two of the cupheas and two of the plumbagos (have had a problem bringing through winters in the past). Guess a mild winter is a good thing even if there was little rain.

One thing I did screw up while weed-popping. I planted fall asters for the first time last fall during my garden hoe project. Today, I was weeding the bed the fall asters are in and saw plant growth near the base of all the aster plants that didn't look like fall aster. If you remember from an earlier post, here is what the fall aster looks like:

Notice the narrow leaf. The weeds I saw were much different - wider leaves and slightly fuzzy looking. They were also coming up from the periphery around the base of the original plant. However, after weeding three of the plants, I realized that I wasn't seeing these "weeds" anywhere else in the bed except for around the asters.


Then I looked up fall asters again and this is what I found on new growth: I had been pulling the new growth the entire time! Talk about feeling like an idiot. All I can do now is just hope that I didn't totally kill the plant and that they still keep growing (even though I "weeded" all the new growth off of three of the four plants)! You can't tell me that this stuff doesn't look like a weed...