There are tomatillos everywhere. I planted two. I have tomatillos where I planted them last year. I have tomatillos next to where I planted them. I have tomatillos in the backyard where I gave the old plants to the chickens. If nothing else, I should get plenty of tomatillos this year.

Most of the back half of the first picture is tomatillos. The chickens planted these ones.

My spring garden is still going strong, and I have some broccoli that I had nearly given up on. Soon, I’m planning on ripping some of it out and planting fall crops. I’ve never been good at fall crops because you have to plant them in July. And by the way, straw bale gardening is too dry. I don’t like it–I have to water the thing every day and it’s not even doing good.

My first garlic crop ever. I was a bit late harvesting these. With how much I use garlic, this is a probably over a year’s supply.

The herb spiral looks great. I just need to actually use it more. So what do I put in my soup tonight–fennel, sage or rosemary? I also have yarrow and chamomile here.

This planter looks awful. My kids planted the corn stalk and I just kept it. It isn’t a bad idea, but doesn’t quite work off center.

Agastache that I planted from seed. It isn’t too showy, but still fragrant and I love the mix of colors on the flowers.

A month ago, my neighbor asked if I planted my garden and then asked where. I realized that you couldn’t tell where I had planted anything, because I didn’t plant in bare soil just chopped cover crop. Well, now you can tell. It’s actually less weedy than I think bare soil would have been. I did have to keep chopping back the cover crop for a few weeks, but otherwise it worked great. The plants have been a bit slow, no harvests yet. Should have summer squash in a few days with cherry tomatoes close behind.

I’ve been feeling a bit down about my yard: it is covered in weeds. I don’t feel like I really know what I’m doing, and if I did everything would look a lot better. I try to write at least once a week, and not wanting to write anything, I decided to sort through some old blogs posts.

I have posts from five years ago, what I was doing then in my garden that was north facing patio. I have failed a ton. I have also succeeded. I have learned from my failures and successes, and I am gardening better. My view and knowledge of gardening has grown from doing my best where I was and also experimenting a lot.

Gardening is interesting. I went to school in Horticulture. I’ve grown gardens everywhere I’ve lived. I give people advice and even get paid for it. I am not a beginner. Yet I also feel I have a lifetime of knowledge yet to gain. I might not be a beginner to most people’s standards, but I feel like one compared to the vastness of wisdom and knowledge I can still gain. Gardening is studying ecology, biology, climate, soils, art and more. It is studying the work of God, and any study of that will take longer than a lifetime to figure out.

Back to my garden: I started to see it a little differently. Yes, they are rampantly growing weeds everywhere. It looks, to a normal person, like a mess. But it so abundant compared to pictures from a year ago. Then soil stayed bare. Weeds grew slowly. The landscape was flat, boring, dry. It isn’t anymore. It doesn’t meet a normal standards for a good garden. But it is my garden, and in it I can see years of changing views, years of studying, and an attitude of throwing out traditional practices.

My garden does not meet traditional standards for I have made my own standards of experimentation, permaculture, and patience.

And I remembered why I’m blogging. It’s a little bit for people who might read this and gain something. It is far more about me being able to see where I’ve come from and understand where I am in the present.

I’ve had vegetables waiting for me. Mostly lettuce. It’s been outside for weeks. I will occasionally go pick some when I needed it, but not that much. Finally I realized I just needed to pick a bunch and bring it inside. That way I would be more likely to use it. And it is nice and crisp in the morning, rather than in the evening when it can get a bit wilted. Maybe we should be eating salads for breakfast–that’s when they would be the most fresh and taste the best from the garden.

I also had my first harvest of garlic scapes and made a pesto with them. It was very strong, and I got thinking about the allician content of the scapes. I’m guessing (based on taste and smell) it would be pretty high. I’ve also been noticing that a little bit of dirt usually comes in with the harvest and often persists even after washing. I’ve kind of thought that this is actually a good thing, and that exposure to dirt can actually help us be more healthy. (You can google this.)

Anyway, that is my health-related advice from observation in the garden today. It has no scientific backing, but I haven’t been sick, other than colds, for a very long time. I thinking eating from my own garden has a lot to do with that.

I’m suspicious of organic weed killers. It seems to me that they are either very ineffective, or actually pretty toxic. (Vinegar at high conversations is nasty stuff.)

I saw this organic weed killer, and just ignored it at first. Someone else later recommended it, so I went ahead and bought the recipe and gave it a go.

Two hours later, here were my weeds. The brown is were I applied the weed killer. I was surprised at how quickly it work.

The weeds continued to turn brown and die back. Here’s my thoughts on what I think is going on. This suffocates the plants, plugging up the stomata, preventing the plant from transpiring or getting air. It worked better when the plants were in full sun.

There are limitations to this: it had to be applied pretty thickly to be effective, and just isn’t practical for large areas. It also works as a contact herbicides, so it isn’t going down into the roots like a traditional systemic herbicides like roundup. The bindweed it “killed” grew back in a couple weeks.

I think I mostly prefer chickens, cover cropping, sheet mulching and hand wedding to this method, but it has its place.