One With the Dirt

The birds have been feasting on my red currants and the chipmunks on my strawberries.  It was time to get picking them before there were none left for me. 

Liam helped me harvest the red currants.  He tried one and decided they were too sour to eat so we decided to save them to put in biscuits.

Seamus helped me pick strawberries from our patch.  Like Liam he tried one, and then another, and then another.  Needless to say, our final strawberry harvest was meagre - partly due to the chipmunk but mostly due to Seamus' endless appetite for those sweet red berries.

The more I harvest, the more I am motivated to weed my gardens to improve my future harvests.  We began with weeding the well garden, which really should be called the thistle garden.  It is a beast. 

Liam was an amazing help.  We ripped out thistles left and right for over an hour.

Liam and Seamus were done helping after this garden, so they played in the backyard while I weeded all the box and pallet vegetable gardens.  It was a big job but the gardens look so much better now!  During Alistair's afternoon nap, I managed to weed about a quarter of the main kitchen garden. 

The disaster that is my kitchen garden.

In spite of sustaining two minor stinging nettle injuries, I successfully rescued the peas, beans, and cucumbers from under a blanket of weeds.  By this point, I was exhausted and hot and very, very dirty.  One might say that I had become one with the dirt.

Time for a good scrub and a rest.  I have no doubt that the rest of the kitchen garden weeds will still be there tomorrow.  Weed free gardens - here I come!